‘If I were you, I’d go left,’ he said. ‘It’s the scenic route.’
They drove for a few minutes. Fry’s passenger hardly spoke, but gave her directions by holding up a hand at junctions to indicate left or right. She guessed he was thinking that he would honestly be able to say that he had never told her anything.
‘Stop here/ he said.
‘Is this it?’
‘I get out here.’
They were in a street of Victorian terraces, with little flights of steps to their front doors and drawn curtains. Fry pulled up in front of a row of shops, mostly boarded up, but for an Asian greengrocer’s where the lights were still on.
‘Is this it?’ she said again.
‘Yes,’ he snapped. ‘The red door. But if you’re going to try to get in there, you’re crazier than I thought.’
‘Thanks for the concern. It’s touching.’
He got out, slammed the door and in a moment had vanished into the darkness, walking quickly in the shadow of the deserted shop fronts.
Fry had no intention of going into the house. She was prepared to wait for as long as necessary.
In the end, it took two hours. When the woman finally appeared, Fry got out of the car and walked towards her along the pavement, pulling up the collar of her black coat and tucking her chin into her red scarf. She stared at the woman openly, trying to see the girl she was looking for in the way that the woman walked, the angle she held her head, or the look in her eyes.
Fry didn’t stop or speak to the woman. She walked on past her, and continued to the end of the block, where she came to a halt on the kerb and stared blankly at the corner of an empty florist’s shop. For a few seconds, she had been walking along an entirely different street in another city, in a different time. She had been a younger Diane Fry, the one who had looked into every face she passed, expecting to see someone else. But trying to see ghosts never worked. It hadn’t then, and it didn’t work now.
As Fry listened to the woman’s footsteps fade away behind her, a door opened and closed, a car sounded its horn on the corner
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and drove away with a screech of lyres, and she realized that she had forgotten where she was.
But, worst of all, she had forgotten why she had been trying to see someone who wasn’t there.
Somehow, Ben Cooper had found himself in a room whose walls were covered in white tiles, many of them crazed into patterns of tiny cracks that had absorbed dirt over the years. The only light came from two tiny windows over the doors on to the street, and even the windows were covered in’ steel mesh and spiders’ webs. In front of the doors stood a white Land Rover with its bonnet propped open. There was an overwhelming smell of old sump oil inside the stuffy space.
Cooper took a step down into the garage, then stopped. He knew he was in the wrong place. The day had been going badly already, and this was getting worse. He must have been too tired or distracted to be concentrating properly, otherwise he would never have ended up here.
And what a place to be. The tiles made the garage look the way public toilets had done once, before vandalism had made local councils adopt a more cost-effective approach. Bare breeze-block and polished aluminium were the style these days.
But it was the smell that made Cooper’s hands begin to itch. They immediately felt as though they were covered in grease, and his fingernails were scraped and ragged, and full of black dirt. The pathways in his brain had been stimulated by the oily smell, prompted into recalling the many times he had peered and poked inside the engine compartment of a similar Land Rover, or sometimes a David Brown tractor. He could feel the cold metal under his fingers, which were always numb, because it always seemed to be winter. And he could feel the old blue overalls that he had worn, with the sleeves rolled up over his wrists because they were a couple of sizes too big for him.
Most often, the young Ben had been completely ignorant of what he was supposed to be doing inside the engine. But he had been enjoying the feeling of a shared moment, whether it had been with his older brother Matt, or his uncle John. Or even, rarely, his father. Joe Cooper had not been quite so tolerant of inexperienced help, and would snatch a spanner from his son’s hand the second he looked likely to turn it the wrong way. There was a curious kind of bonding that took place over a set of dirty spark
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plugs or a blocked fuel jet. The words alone, as they came into his mind, made Cooper smile with something like nostalgia.
Following a trace of light, he walked to the back of the garage and found himself in a workshop behind it. Two men were in there, drinking tea from mugs. One of them wore overalls, and the other was in uniform, with a yellow jacket and the peaked cap of a traffic officer on a bench next to him. They both looked up at Cooper in amazement. The traffic officer twitched, and spilled some of his tea on his uniform trousers.
‘Can we help?’ said the one in overalls.
I’ve just come from a meeting upstairs and I think I must have taken a wrong turn,’ said Cooper. ‘Can you show me the way out?’
‘CID, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thought so.’
‘I’m DC Cooper, from Edendale.’
The expression on the traffic officer’s face changed, and Cooper knew what he was going to say.
‘I’m Dave Ludlam,’ he said. ‘I knew your dad.’
‘A lot of people did.’
‘I served with him for a while, when I was a young bobby. He was a good sergeant, Joe Cooper. Tough, but fair.’
