The Sleeping and the Dead Page 9

‘He didn’t say much, but what was there to say? His girlfriend had practically accused him of kidnap. That girl needs help.’

  She switched off her phone and dialled Joe’s house. The answerphone clicked in straight away. She left a message for Joe saying she’d call him the next day. She thought then that she should phone Mel and check that she was all right but knew that should wait until she was sober. She’d only lose her temper. She seemed to lie awake for hours but she didn’t hear her mother come in.

  Chapter Ten

  Sally was very eager that Hannah should go to the police station as soon as they returned from the school reunion.

  ‘It’ll be all over the papers tomorrow. They’ve got a picture. Someone will tell that detective you were Michael Grey’s girlfriend. Better he hear it from you. Of course, I’ll come with you if you like.’

  Of course, Hannah thought. That was what Sally wanted. She was a journalist, even if not a very grand one. She saw a story she could sell.

  ‘Let the poor woman eat,’ Roger said.

  Hannah was grateful. Perhaps it was the shock but she was ravenous.

  In the end two detectives came out to the hotel. It was Sally’s suggestion. She said the national press was already sniffing around in the town. On second thoughts this would be more discreet. And, thought Hannah, it would give Sally more control. Hannah didn’t mind. She felt very tired. She didn’t think she could face going out.

  It was after ten when the detectives arrived, just dark, still very warm. Rosie didn’t seem to have grasped the significance of the body in the lake. She went, a little unsteadily, to their room. The staff were clearing up in the dining-room and there were still guests in the lounge, so Sally let them use her private sitting-room. Roger brought in a tray of coffee. There was a bowl of roses on the table. Later Hannah would remember their fragrance, the scent of filter coffee and another smell which she realized was pipe tobacco. Although the older detective made no attempt to smoke on that occasion, it seemed that he was an addict and his pipe was always in his pocket. It must have been hard for him to sit there for so long without it.

  She couldn’t decide at first which was the senior officer. The older man was shorter, slight and dark, with an accent which suggested he came from the coast, from one of those villages where the pits used to be. He had the look of a collier about him. He wore a grey suit. The trousers were too big for him and held up by a thin belt. His shoes were as black and shiny as a prison officer’s boots. The younger man was tall, prematurely balding. If she’d met him on a social occasion, Hannah would have guessed that he taught humanities at a college for further education. He could even have been a librarian. He wore odd socks and scuffed suede boots. The older one was called Stout, the younger Porteous. They must have given their ranks when they introduced themselves but Hannah had been in too much of a daze to take in the information.

  They were very polite, but something about their manner put Hannah on her guard. She drank a cup of Roger’s good, strong coffee and tried to clear her head. She had heard the prisoners talking and knew that the police weren’t always to be trusted. What they wanted now was to clear up their case as quickly as possible. There wouldn’t be two detectives here, at this time of night, if they didn’t think there was something in her story for them. For the first time she wondered what Sally had told them. There had been a muttered conversation at the door before she’d shown them in. She had been surprised when Sally had left them alone together without any fuss. But perhaps she was standing at the door now with a glass to her ear. Or perhaps there was a tape recorder hidden under one of the cushions on the sofa.

  ‘I don’t know what Sally has told you . . .’ she said. She wanted to take the initiative, to appear purposeful, to let them know she couldn’t be browbeaten.

  Porteous, the younger, answered. He seemed diffident, almost apologetic. The voice was educated, but somewhere behind the polish there was a Midland whine.

  ‘She said that you and Mr Grey were close at the time of his death.’

  Stout interrupted briskly. ‘We think it’s possible, Mrs Morton, that you were the last person to see him alive. That, at least, is the information we’ve been given.’

  Hannah stared at them. Trust Sally to stir things up. Trust her to turn this into the plot line of a soap opera. Hannah thought her judgement had been right all along. She should never have been persuaded to come back.

  ‘I know it’s a long time,’ Porteous said. ‘But if you could just take your mind back . . .’

  ‘How did he die?’ Hannah demanded. ‘You must have done a post-mortem if you know he was murdered. You pulled him out days ago.’

  They seemed shocked and the words sounded callous even in her own head, but Hannah needed to get the facts straight, neatly catalogued like books on a shelf. Stout looked at Porteous who nodded imperceptibly. She realized then that Porteous must be the superior and was glad to have another fact sorted.

  ‘He was stabbed,’ Stout said, ‘with a sharp, wide-bladed knife.’

  Hannah had an image of Jenny Graves at a school play rehearsal. It must have been a dress rehearsal because she was in costume. Her dress had been hired from the local amateur-dramatic society and was scarlet, laced at the front, daringly low cut. She had fake blood all over her hand. Mr Westcott had been so pleased with her performance that he had clapped. Hannah realized that the detectives were staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘Have you told Michael’s family?’ she asked, not putting off answering but fishing again for information. She was still curious about Michael’s family.

  Again Stout and Porteous looked at each other. Again, it seemed Stout was given permission to answer.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, we seem to have come up with a bit of a problem there. We’re having some difficulty tracing them. He seems to have been a real mystery your young man, a real mystery. That was one of the reasons why we were so keen to talk to you.’

  They looked at Hannah expectantly. At last she felt obliged to tell them at least something of what she knew.

  ‘When we were at school together Michael Grey lived with foster parents. His mother had died and his father had worked abroad a lot. Or was ill. I’m not sure.’ It had seemed to Hannah even in the beginning that Michael had made himself up as he went along. He changed his story to suit his audience. She had caught him out a few times and at first it had seemed to disconcert him. Later, when he realized how she felt about him, he had only grinned.

  ‘What did the father do?’ Stout asked. ‘Work, I mean. The boy must have said.’

  ‘I got the impression that he was employed by the Government. Some high-powered diplomat or civil servant. Something that took him away a lot.’

  ‘He must have come back sometimes to see his son.’

  ‘No. Never. Not that I remember. I never met him.’

  ‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’

  Hannah didn’t answer. Michael’s strangeness had been part of his attraction.

  ‘What about the foster parents?’ Porteous asked. His voice was gentle. Hannah thought he had set out to win her round. ‘You must be able to tell us about them.’

  She knew he would have got that much at least from the school records, but decided to play the game.

  ‘Their names were Brice. Stephen and Sylvia. An elderly couple, more like grandparents than parents. They’d never had children of their own. Stephen was a retired vicar. They were devoted to each other, kind to everyone, into good causes. They lived in one of those terraced houses near the school.’ She looked up at him sharply. ‘You must know all this.’

  ‘Part of it. I haven’t been able to speak to anyone who knew them.’

  ‘I didn’t really know them,’ she said quickly. ‘I only met them once or twice.’

  They had come to the performance of Macbeth. From her position as prompt, Hannah had seen them sitting proudly in the front row. At the end they had stood up and cheered, more like elderly eccentrics on
the last night of the Proms than the audience of a school play. She could imagine them dressed up and waving a Union Jack. They had seemed to her then very old and even now, looking back from middle-age, she thought they must have been in their late sixties or seventies. They both had silver hair. Sylvia wore hers long, pinned back with a tortoiseshell comb. Their house was the quietest Hannah had ever been in. There was no television or radio. She remembered a ginger cat which purred and a clock which chimed the quarter-hour. She presumed this was not the sort of information which would be of interest to Porteous or Stout.

  ‘They never reported him missing,’ Stout said in a slightly aggrieved way, as if he took the Brices’ failure to make a fuss personally. ‘Nobody started looking for him until they died. Then the solicitor tried but couldn’t trace him.’

  Hannah wondered what had happened to the small, tidy house. It seemed unfeeling to ask. She had gone there first for tea. Michael had asked her. Although the Brices hadn’t been expecting her they were thrilled to see her. ‘We’re always telling Michael he should invite his friends in.’

  His attitude to them was delightful. He was thoughtful and playful. He called them Sylvie and Steve. But as they sat in front of the fire in the tiny drawing-room, eating seed cake and crumpets, the thread of the conversation had led Hannah to think that they knew little more about his past than she did. It seemed that Stephen had been invited to a theological college in Idaho to give a lecture on the Psalms. They had been discussing flight plans, when Sylvia asked suddenly, ‘Have you ever been abroad, Michael? I can’t remember your saying.’

  It was as if they had depended on what he told them for their knowledge of him. Hannah struggled to explain that to the detectives. ‘I don’t think they were relatives. They probably didn’t think there was anything sinister in his disappearance. They’d be sorry he hadn’t kept in touch, but they wouldn’t see it as their affair to meddle.’

  ‘What was he doing with them then?’ Stout demanded. ‘You wouldn’t just invite a strange teenager into your house.’

  ‘I think they were the sort of people who might.’ She paused. ‘They called him their gift from God.’

  She’d always thought it was a strange thing to say. Michael had spoken of it in a slightly shamefaced way. ‘Look, Steve, that’s a big thing to live up to, you know?’ But the detectives remained impassive and unsurprised. She continued talking, trying to give an explanation they would accept as reasonable. ‘He arrived with them out of the blue, then disappeared in the same way. Perhaps that’s why they never reported him missing. They felt they had no claim on him.’

  ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Stout said. ‘That’s all very well, but they must have met up with him somewhere. He wouldn’t just have knocked on the door.’

  ‘Perhaps it was arranged through a charity,’ Porteous suggested. He looked at Hannah hopefully. ‘Was anything like that mentioned, Mrs Morton? Can you remember the name of any organization which might have put Michael in touch with the Brices?’

  She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me,’ she said. ‘He liked being a mystery.’

  ‘All the same he must have said something. When you asked about his family, his previous school, he must have given some scrap of information.’

  Despite her resistance, memories were already clicking into her brain, jerky images like an old home movie.

  ‘He told me a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Not all of them were true.’

  ‘But . . ?’ Porteous prompted.

  ‘But I really think his mother died when he was little. He was quite specific about that. She died of leukaemia and he could remember the funeral. Nobody had explained to him properly what was going on. He couldn’t understand where his mother was. When a black car turned up at the house, he thought it was to take him to see her.’ Hannah stopped, then continued hesitantly, ‘It was early spring. There were crocuses on the lawn. I don’t know if that’s any help.’ She thought: Unless that was one of his fictions too.

  Porteous said, ‘At present everything is helpful.’

  ‘There is something else.’ She paused. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she had a sense too that she was betraying Michael. But it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to give the detectives something to get them off her back. ‘He resat the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of us.’ Again she saw she was telling the men something they already knew and wondered what other secrets they were keeping to themselves. ‘He made up a tale about his having been ill, but it was quite similar to his story of his mother’s illness. I was taken in by it at the time. Why wouldn’t I be? But now I work as a prison librarian and it’s occurred to me that there might be another explanation for his missing year. I wondered if he might have been in trouble. Youth custody. Borstal, I suppose it would have been then. That would be something he wouldn’t want to admit to the Brices or to me. That wouldn’t fit into the Michael Grey myth.’

  She realized she sounded bitter and to hide her confusion poured herself another cup of coffee, though by now it was cold. Porteous jotted a few lines in his notebook but gave no other indication of what he thought of the theory.

  ‘Was he the sort of lad who might have been away?’ Stout asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You work in the nick, Mrs Morton. There aren’t many well-read, nicely spoken blokes in there.’

  ‘More than you’d realize.’ She thought of Marty, whose consideration had led to her being there.

  ‘But you know what I mean,’ Stout persisted. ‘Most of the men will have been brought up with some degree of physical and emotional deprivation.’

  It seemed an odd thing for a policeman to say. She took his point more seriously.

  ‘Michael was a brilliant actor. And he was quick and bright. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Do I think he was brought up in the west end of Newcastle or on a council estate in Wallsend? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be astonished if that turned out to be the case.’

  ‘Where was he brought up then?’

  ‘West Yorkshire. At least that’s where he said he went to school.’ Hannah waited for another question: And before that? But it never came. Besides, she had told them the truth. On Michael’s first day a girl from the upper sixth had asked which school he’d come from and he’d answered, without pausing a moment, giving her a smile: ‘A place in West Yorkshire. You won’t have heard of it.’

  When Hannah told Porteous that, he wrote it down and said seriously to Stout, ‘It seems a strange thing to make up, that, off the cuff. Check out approved schools, borstals and detention centres for that period in Yorkshire. Or perhaps that’s where his family lived. We might find his mother’s records.’

  I don’t think you will, Hannah thought, and wondered why she didn’t speak the words out loud. Porteous turned to her with his diffident smile, which wasn’t very different from one of the expressions in Michael’s repertoire. ‘Is there anything else you remember from that first meeting, Mrs Morton?’

  She didn’t answer. She thought she’d given him enough.

  ‘You don’t know how much this is helping us. We’re very fortunate to have found a reliable witness at this early stage. What about his voice? Could you believe that he came from Yorkshire?’

  ‘It depended to whom he was talking.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It was a habit. I explained he was an actor but I don’t think this was self-conscious. He didn’t realize he was changing his voice to suit the occasion. But he was. When he was speaking to us he spoke as we did. With the Brices it was old-fashioned English. We had a biology teacher from Edinburgh. She thought he came from there too because when he spoke to her he had something of the accent. It wasn’t imitation or that he was trying to impress. He was a sort of verbal chameleon.’

  Hannah sipped cold coffee. She thought she had nothing left to tell them. Surely now they would let her go. But Porteous shifted uncomfortably in his ve
ry comfortable chair.

  ‘Tell us about you relationship with Mr Grey,’ he said gently. He was more like a counsellor than a police officer. ‘In some detail if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Morton. If you could cast your mind back.’

  ‘We were friends,’ Hannah said.

  ‘More than friends surely.’

  ‘Not at first.’

  The men waited for her to say more.

  ‘What are these questions about?’ She’d had enough. ‘You know who he is. Sally told me you found the dental records. There must be more efficient ways of finding what you want than listening to my ram-blings.’

  Porteous gave another little apologetic smile. ‘Unfortunately not. Apart from your ramblings we’ve very little. We know that the body in the lake was that of a young man known as Michael Grey. One day he had toothache and Mrs Brice took him to her dentist. We’re lucky that the practice kept records, but it hasn’t provided us with a conclusive identification. It hasn’t helped us to trace the victim’s family. Because no birth certificate was issued to Michael Grey on the date he gave as his date of birth. There are no medical records or child-benefit records for him. There is no record of his having existed before he started school with you.’

  They looked at her. It had been a long time since anyone had given her their full attention. She found it flattering. No doubt it was a technique they often used. She was taken in by it. She dragged her memory back almost thirty years.

  Chapter Eleven

  Her father died the summer Michael arrived. He committed suicide. He rigged up a hose-pipe from the exhaust of their Austin and the fumes killed him. Hannah didn’t find him. He had timed it so her mother would do that when she went into the garage to fetch potatoes to peel for their supper. Mr Meek had an allotment. He kept the potatoes in the garage in wooden trays in the dark to stop them sprouting.

  Looking back, Hannah thought her father and mother had never got on. He was nervy, quick to snap. Any noise or disruption to his routine threw him. She thought perhaps she’d inherited her own intolerance of change from him. He was a chain smoker. Every evening he came home from work, threw down his briefcase and would sit for an hour, sucking on cigarette after cigarette, going through the imagined slights of the day. He felt he was much undervalued at the bank. No one appreciated the work he put in. The only time he was anything like content was in the allotment. Perhaps the physical activity helped him to relax. Perhaps in the mindless routine of digging and weeding he could forget his troubles.