Sam was silent. He went on, “Where are you now?”
“I’m…staying with a friend, still.”
“That copper?”
“Yes, that copper. Bob.”
“Right.”
“He wanted me to report it. We’ve rowed about it all day. This could really foul up his career.”
“Tell him to keep his fucking nose out.”
“I’m not going to talk about this now. We’ll keep the police out of this, right?”
Mark felt himself sneer. “We’re no strangers to that, are we, Sam?”
She simply repeated, “I’ll keep the police out of this, so long as you bring my daughter back from Leeds with you.”
“And afterwards?”
“What?”
“When we get back to normal? Will you keep the police out of our lives then? This Bill, or Bob, or whatever you call him?”
She gave a shuddering laugh. “I don’t believe you. Just get on that train, Kelly, and sort that pervert out. Now!”
The phone clicked off.
Iris said, “I don’t understand.”
“While you were out,” Peggy told her, “we had a phone call.”
Mark was tying his shoelaces. “It was Tony.”
Peggy took hold of Iris by her elbows. Over the past day it seemed at times as if Iris had been worst hit by Sally’s disappearance. As dawn came up on Christmas morning, she had been sitting among the abandoned wrapping paper in Mark’s flat.
“My fault. I put her to bed. I never closed her window. It was my idea to go walking like that…like bloody…like…” Sitting naked still in all the rubbish, she had looked pathetic. Peggy had been caught between the sight of her, Mark slumped on Sally’s bed, and her own panic.
Now Iris was asking, “Who is Tony?”
Mark was stuffing things into an overnight case Peggy had found for him. “Someone I used to know. That note in the Christmas pudding was from him.”
“Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
BOB’S HOUSE WAS A PIGSTY. SAM HAD NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE. SHE SAT down on the green settee, on a tangle of stale blue shirts. She’d never dreamed this would be the way to leave Mark, nor that these would be the circumstances of her escape.
On the wall there was one of those mass-produced paintings from the seventies showing a child with a tear rolling down his cheek. These paintings were rumoured to be jinxed and the cause of house-fires. Bob’s mam, he said, had pressed it upon him when he moved out to his own home. That and his tea service. He put by her feet a cup of thick, greasy tea.
“You made me sound so bad just then, on the phone,” he said.
She took her head out of her hands. “What?”
“You told them that I wanted you to report Sally’s disappearance just because of my work.”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters if I come out of this looking like a complete shit. I care, too, you know. I want to do something.”
“You hardly know the kid. She’s mine.”
“But if we…carry on, if you stay here; she’ll be mine, too, then.”
“Leave it for now, Bob. Don’t fuck it up by talking about it now. It’s like tempting fate. Just don’t do it.”
Bob had seen Sally only once before. It had been one of those rare days when Sam finished work early because Mark had a job interview in Darlington. On the spur of the moment she asked Bob to come with her to meet Sally, instead of keeping their usual rendezvous. At the bottom of the school gates Bob had carefully shaken Sally’s hand.
“Are you being arrested?” she asked her mother.
Sam was watching the other mothers watching them. Let them, she thought. She liked to be thought of as an unusual family. “He’s a friend of ours.”
“Are you giving us a lift in your police car?”
“We’re catching the bus. Bob has to go back to work.”
The child had given him a long, appraising look. Bob had been pleased; he felt himself being measured up as a replacement father. Sally had smiled briefly and then walked slowly past, dismissing him.
“She likes you,” Sam told him afterwards.
“Mark’s going to Leeds tonight,” Sam said. “Tony’s in Leeds.”
“Tony?”
“His ex-lover. Remember? He’s got Sally.”
The blood drained from Bob’s face. “Christ!” He looked completely helpless. “What’s going to happen, Sam?”
“I wanted to go down to Leeds with him, but he wouldn’t let me. He’s got to sort this out for himself, he said. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Ha!”
“Is there an address?”
“He wouldn’t give me one.”
“So we just have to sit?”
“Looks like it.”
“While those two faggots discuss the future of our family?”
Sam looked up at him with the greased tea cooling in her palms. “Our family?” she asked.
“PLEASE, MARK,” PEGGY HAD SAID, “PHONE US. TELL US WHAT’S HAP-pening.”
On the bus all the way to Darlington her words kept coming back to him. What did she think? That he’d just up and leave them in the dark?
“Will you come back tomorrow?” Iris had asked. Her voice was broken. They were in the kitchen just before he left. He hoisted the bag over his shoulder, knotted the scarf at his throat. Iris looked exactly what she was: a little old woman, distracted by fear. She had never struck him that way before. It was as if, after her ritual disrobing on Christmas Eve, she had remained a pale shadow of her former self. Then she had appeared pared down, vital; the essential part of Iris. Now she just looked stick-thin and frail with anxiety. Mark couldn’t bring himself to reassure her.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he said truthfully. “I’ve got to see what Tony wants.”
Neither Iris nor Peggy knew what Tony was like; they hardly knew anything about him. But Mark did. Until a certain age he had known everything about Tony, and Tony everything about him. Perhaps this was Tony’s way of bringing him up to date. He was being summoned to a résumé. That was the way too look at it. That was the safer version. It was
