Stone Cold Red Hot - [25]

“Did you know she was pregnant?”

“Lisa told me,” she sounded a bit miffed about that. “I was away most of the summer. My parents had a place in Brittany. I missed all the action. When I came back Lisa told me about Jenny and I felt really sorry for her, she should have been on the pill. I’ve often wondered what she did about it. If I’d been in her shoes I’d have had an abortion, especially you know, with the father…”

“What?”

She flushed slightly, blew her nose again. “He was black, wasn’t he. It wasn’t like it is now. And her father would have gone mad if he knew. We never could work out if she’d told them. Lisa said she hadn’t. But when Jennifer never went back I thought she probably had told them and they’d just cut her off. He had a breakdown as well didn’t he, Mr Pickering, had to give up work, that could have been why.” There was a triumphant smile on her lips. “Especially if Jenny insisted on keeping the child.”

“You say her father would have been very upset, was he closer to her than her mother?” I tried to picture Jennifer as a Daddy’s Girl and failed.

“No,” she shuffled on the sofa, “but he had very strong opinions. He wouldn’t approve of people intermarrying. Stick to your own. Of course he was the leader at that Church as well so it’d have been awful for him that way too.”

And for Jennifer? Caroline seemed to have little compassion.

“He had a point really,” she sipped her drink, “it wasn’t so bad back then but it’s all gone too far really. I mean, I go to the shops round here and I’m the only person speaking English. Little Pakistan. And no-one dares to say anything about it. Everything’s so softly softly. What about the right to free speech?”

“So her father was a racist?” I asked coldly. “What about her mother?”

She shrugged. “Went along with his principles I suppose. She was very old-fashioned.”

“How did Jennifer get along with her parents?”

“Not well,” she wheezed a little and cleared her throat. “They were very strict. She couldn’t wait to leave home.”

“Were you and Jennifer close?”

“Seemed like it then, the four of us went around together, Lisa, Jenny, Frances and me. But once we’d all left school, we made new friends. I came here, Lisa had a place at Crewe. I went to Frances’s wedding,” she added, “and Lisa’s – that was a right farce.”

“Why?”

“Lisa getting married.” She jerked her head as if I needed reminding about something. “Thank God they never had kids.”

My incomprehension must have shown.

“You know,” she prompted.

I didn’t.

“She’s gay, isn’t she, a lesbian. There was all that stuff in the papers, last year, that was her.”

I shook my head. I didn’t know what had been in the papers.

Caroline’s eyes brightened with the gossip. “She was a teacher, further education college. Word got out she was a lesbian, right, she was seeing one of her students,” she grimaced, “it was all over the papers, The Sun and everything. She had to leave her job. There was a lot of Muslim students – they won’t stand for it. Don’t you remember?”

What, one rabid tabloid witch-hunt from among all the others? No. It did help explain Lisa’s caution when I’d got in touch and her hesitation when I’d asked her how close she had been to Jennifer.

“I’d no idea she was like that,” Caroline continued, “if I’d known when we were at school.” She twisted her mouth with distaste. “We slept at each others houses and everything. I hadn’t a clue. It’s the husband I feel sorry for, getting married and then…what he must have been through.”

I stared at her. How the hell did she know I wasn’t ‘like that’ too? I was more than eager to conclude my interview with Caroline Cunningham. She had rapidly become my least favourite of Jennifer’s friends. But I still had a few more questions to ask her.

“When did you last see Jennifer?”

“Before I went on holiday to Brittany.”

“So you didn’t see her before she left for Keele?”

“No. Should have done though. It was my birthday on the 14th. We were all going to go for a meal and then onto the Ritz in town. We’d been planning it for ages. Sort of last fling before we all went off to uni. She never came. I was a bit pissed off to be honest. But then when I heard about the baby I thought maybe she couldn’t face it. She could have sent a card or something though. It’s like she just gave up on everybody. Who needs friends like that?”

“Perhaps she’d gone for an abortion, thought people would disapprove.”

“Not us. Well, apart from Frances who was holier than thou about things like that. There were two girls in school had abortions in the sixth form, everyone knew. It was OK. People felt sorry for them.”

“So why do you think Jennifer dropped all her friends? Never got in touch.”

She shrugged. “Because we reminded her of home, of her parents? She wanted a new start? Who knows? We thought it was quite exciting at the time, once it turned out that she’d left the university and she wouldn’t tell anyone where she was living. Romantic. Jenny cutting herself off from her family. I think we imagined her swanning back when she’d made a success of her life, rubbing their noses in it, but she never did, did she? Sank without trace.”