Reginald Hill - The Only Game

She glanced at a photo on the mantelpiece of a man in a soutane standing in front of a gloomy Gothic pile. It was her pride in having had a priest in the family which had made her uncharacteristically forthcoming, Dog guessed. Now, as if in reaction, she snapped, ‘What have you done with your face?’

The question took him by surprise. He was used to the curious side-glance or the carefully averted gaze, but direct questioning was a rarity.

‘A car accident,’ he said dismissively.

‘Oh yes. The drink was it?’ she said.

‘Yes. The drink played a part,’ he said softly.

Sitting in the bar, wanting another, hardly able to rise and go for it. The barman setting a pint of Guinness and a chaser before him. ‘Compliments.’ Nodding across the room to where a man stands, face beneath his old tweed hat unmemorable enough to be a forgotten acquaintance. A faint smile, a glass half raised , then the unmemorable blocked out by the unforgettable, a woman, her face candle-pale with emotion, her hair a flame that never burnt on any mere candle. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Dog? After what happened you must be mad! Let’s get you home.’

‘Men,’ said Mrs Maguire contemptuously. ‘If it’s not the fancy women, it’s the booze.’

Coming out of the bar, his arm across her shoulders. Light and the sound of laughter behind them; ahead, darkness and a rising wind with a caress of soft Irish rain. Her face turned up to his as he staggered on the uneven surface of the car park. ‘Darling, are you all right for the driving?’ His own voice slurred and angry. ‘Why not? No one asks me if I’m all right for the killing, do they?’

‘You’re so right, Mrs Maguire,’ he said. ‘It’s usually one or the other.’

She looked at him sharply, suspicious of irony. Then, surprised at detecting none, she folded her arms and said, ‘All right, Mr Cicero, what’s your business with me?’

He brought himself back to the present and said, ‘It’s about your daughter.’

‘Has there been an accident?’ she asked in alarm. He examined the alarm, found it genuine. Why not? Love was not a prerogative of the attractive.

He said, ‘Not an accident. An incident. As far as we know your daughter is fine.’

It was an evasion, also an economy with the truth, but he wanted as many answers as possible before the direction of his questions hit her.

‘When did you last see Jane?’ he asked.

Use of the Christian name seemed to reassure her.

‘At the weekend. Saturday,’ she replied.

So she had come here when she fled the social worker’s knock.

‘Were you expecting her?’ he asked.

‘No, I wasn’t. They came right out of the blue,’ she said in an aggrieved tone. ‘I had nothing ready, I might have been out or anything.’

He noted they but didn’t comment. He guessed that the moment she got wind he was interested in the boy, there would be no progress till she learned what was going on.

He said, ‘How long did Jane stay?’

‘Not long.’ A barrier had come down.

He said, ‘Overnight?’

‘No. She could have done. The room was there like it always has been.’

‘But she decided to leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘You quarrelled,’ he said flatly.

She hesitated then said, ‘What goes on between my daughter and myself is our business. What’s this all about, mister? You said she was all right …’ Then her face went stiff as if she at last felt the chilly north in his questions. ‘It’s not the boy, is it? Nothing’s happened to Oliver?’

There was nothing for it but another fragment of truth.

He said, ‘I’m sorry to say that your grandson is missing.’

Her hands seized the hem of her apron and threw it up to cover the lower part of her face beneath her fear-rounded eyes. It was a gesture he’d only ever seen in films, but there was nothing theatrical about it here in this cold front parlour.

‘Believe me, there’s probably nothing to worry about,’ he urged, justifying his lie with his need to get coherent answers from this woman who might turn out to be one of the last to see the boy alive. ‘Children go missing all the time. Most of them turn up fit and well.’

Slowly the apron was lowered. She didn’t believe him but her wish to be reassured was still stronger than her disbelief.

He went on quickly, ‘Tell me about the visit on Saturday. It might help.’

‘Has he run away, is that it?’

He didn’t answer but smiled encouragingly and felt a pang of shame as she took this for agreement.

‘And you’re wondering if he’s come up here.’

‘Do you think he would come back here?’ he asked. His intention was simple evasion, but he provoked an indignant response.

‘And why wouldn’t he? We get on all right, me and Oliver. But he’s only a baby, how’d he find his way up here? And do you think I’d not let her know straight off though that’d not be easy? We might not see eye to eye, and, yes, I think the lad’d be better off here where there’s someone at home all day, but I’d not keep quiet about something like that. What do you take me for?’

Cicero again felt the distress beneath the indignation, but he was a policeman, not a counsellor, and there were points to get clear.

‘Why wouldn’t it have been easy to let her know if Oliver had turned up here?’

‘Because I don’t have her address!’ she burst out. ‘There, that surprises you, doesn’t it? Four months since she left, and I still don’t have an address.’

‘But how do you keep in touch?’

‘She rings me, usually on a Sunday. We never talk long. She rings from a call box and them pips are forever pipping. I tell her to reverse the charge but she’s not a one to be obligated, our Jane.’

‘Did she ring this Sunday?’

‘No. Something better to do, I expect. Hold on! He’s not been missing since Sunday, has he? Not since Sunday?’

The thought constricted her throat, turning her voice to a thin squeak.

‘No,’ said Cicero. ‘So you’ve no way of getting in touch with her direct?’

‘She told me in emergencies I can ring that friend of hers, that Maddy.’ Her lips crinkled in distaste as she spoke the name.

Maddy. The name in the copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience .

‘Who’s Maddy?’ he asked.

‘One of her college teachers she got friendly with. Too friendly.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Family comes first in my book, mister. Besides, she must be near on my age!’ said Mrs Maguire indignantly. ‘If you must have friends, stick to your own age, your own kind, that’s what I say. I knew this Maddy would be the cause of trouble, and wasn’t I proved in the right of it?’

She nodded with the assurance of one used to being located in the right.

‘Was it this Maddy you quarrelled about then?’

‘It was too! Maybe only indirectly,’ she qualified with reluctant honesty. ‘But she was behind it all the same. Why should her telephone number be such a secret? It’s public property, isn’t it? It’s in the book.’

‘It is if you’ve got a surname and address,’ said Cicero. ‘Do you?’

‘No. I never cared to ask what she might be called and I’ve no idea where she lives,’ admitted the woman.

‘And who was it you gave her number to?’

‘It was this friend of Jane’s, a really nice girl, well spoken, the kind of friend Jane ought to have if she must have them. She’d lost touch with Jane since college and she was so keen to see her again that I saw no harm in giving her this Maddy’s number. It was shaming enough to have to admit I didn’t have an address for my own daughter without pretending there was no way I could get in touch with her.’