Stone Cold Red Hot - [33]

I looked at the letter again and tried to adjust my view of events to fit. I must erase the part about Jennifer going off to university. Why hadn’t she gone? Her grades were good, people said she was excited about the move away, looking forward to it by all accounts. The pregnancy must have changed things. Did this mean she hadn’t had an abortion but had decided to keep the baby, or at least continue the pregnancy? Where had Jennifer gone if not to Keele? To a mother and baby home? Couldn’t she have deferred her course for a year while she had the baby?

I picked up the little mosaic vase that Mrs Clerkenwell had given me and turned it to and fro, examining the tiny fragments of glass mosaic the glinting gold pieces, the irregular colours of the small tiles. It felt cool to the touch. Together the broken pieces made something whole thanks to the craft of its maker. My work felt like that, lots of bits that needed matching together; facts, secrets, hearsay, rumours, all needed fixing in the right place, juxtaposing with the others until the true shape could be discerned. I was re-creating truth not beauty. And truth could be hideous or poignant or whimsical or mundane.

I felt uneasy about the job. It had been hard enough at the outset with so many years since anyone had seen Jennifer but now to find that one of the few facts I had to work with was false made it feel even more of a lost cause. I shivered. The office suddenly felt small, cold and confining.

I rubbed my eyes, got up and switched on the heater, looked at the list I’d made first thing. Tell insurance, borrow car. Who from? Diane didn’t have a car, she roped me in everytime she had to transport frames or canvases or collect new tubs of inks and chemicals. Ray hadn’t got one at the moment, he borrowed mine too and more recently made use of Laura’s. Everyone I could think of who had a car actually used it and wouldn’t be prepared to lend it out. I thought about the next few days. Most of my appointments could be done by bicycle. I should be able to manage. If Mr Poole rang again I’d get a taxi.

That reminded me to get the tape off to Mandy Bellows. I’d brought it to the office. I replayed a section of it in the camera to check that it was reasonable quality. It was. I could make out the individuals, cocky faces sneering as they took turns to ram the ball against the house. I packed the tape in a jiffy bag and rang the courier service I use.

Then I rang the insurers and began the long, slow process of giving them all the details they needed about my stolen car.

Once the courier had called I got ready to leave. There was a noise upstairs, someone coming in. Unusual, as Grant and Jackie Dobson are teachers and rarely home when I am there, and their daughters are at school.

I went upstairs quietly, feeling foolish at how hard my heart was beating. There was someone in the kitchen. I positioned myself near the front door before calling out, “Hello?”

“Sal?” a husky voice replied and Vicky Dobson, the eldest daughter, popped her head round the door. “Hiya. I’ve just got back. Don’t come too near, I need a bath, seriously.” Vicky had been doing the festivals; Glastonbury, Reading, WOMAD and had gone backpacking round Europe in-between. She looked the part; muddy blonde dreadlocks, a set of rings in each nostril, enough in her ears to hang curtains on, a stud in her eyebrow, distressed clothing, acid green Doc Martens. She looked great.

“Good trip?”

“Top. I’m knackered. And starving. I must eat – you want anything?”

“No, I’ve got to get going. See you soon.”

Frances Delaney had a baby draped over her shoulder when she answered the door. “Typical,” she said, “he always sleeps at this time, until I arrange something. Come in.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “mine was just the same.”

“How many have you got?”

“Oh, only the one of my own but we share a house so there’s a little boy as well.”

“I’ve four,” she said, “well, four at the moment.”

“You’re having another?”

She smiled. “I always wanted a big family, sometimes you get what you want.”

We sat in a large room, strewn with baby gear and children’s toys. There was a distinct smell to indicate she’d just changed a nappy. She wore a shapeless, navy jogging suit and moccasin slippers. Her dark wiry hair was pulled back in a yellow hair band. The baby wriggled on her shoulder, she rocked and patted its bottom. She looked ridiculously happy.

I asked her to tell me about the weeks before Jennifer left. I wouldn’t let on to Frances that Jennifer had never gone to Keele; it was my job to find things out not divulge them. Roger Pickering was paying my way and any information belonged to him first and foremost.

“I remember it well, actually, with it being so hot. It was incredible, everything drying up. We used to watch her father watering his plants, every night after work he’d be out there.”

Like my Dad with his vegetables.

“You watched him?” I was trying to picture where the girls had been.

“From my room, it overlooked the gardens. Jenny would come round a lot, our house was right at the back of theirs. We could see across to each others bedrooms.” The baby grizzled and made climbing motions, the stretch fabric of the baby-gro outlining his small limbs and feet. Frances shifted him onto her lap, laid him across her knees on his stomach and stroked his back. His head bobbed like those nodding dogs people used to have in the back window of their cars.