No we don’t, Penny thought. We didn’t know her at all. She steals milk. What’s that to go on? All we’ve got is the ability to recognise another body when we see one. It’s pathetic. But I suppose — she looked round at everyone — we have to do our best.
Tony was still sitting with his head in his hands next to the fridge. The locket’s chain was tangled up in his fingers.
‘What are we shopping for?’ Liz laughed as the great automatic doors swished open and the warm, perfumed Metro Centre air pulled them in. Music was playing, ‘Yesterday Once More’ by the Carpenters. There were mirrors everywhere, fountains with money in, glass elevators and names that were meant to look written, belligerently neon.
‘Holiday clothes and suitcases,’ Cliff hissed and dragged her up an escalator. ‘We are both getting out of it. Come on.
FOURTEEN
Go on then. Bring on the firing squad. We’re ready for you.
Penny dangled her arms over the bridge’s railing. She looked down at the toes of her shoes poking out underneath the bars. Below her, twenty feet down, the brown stream swished and gurgled.
We look ridiculous, in a line like this.
She had an aerial view of a policeman, his head a black circle, a single silver point in its centre. He came out from under the bridge and gazed up at them all.
Vince realised that both he and Penny were tapping their ash carelessly into the breeze. It was drifting down on the coppers. They would think they were doing it on purpose. Next to Penny and Vince was Jane, clutching Peter and gripping Vicki’s hand like a dog’s lead. Vicki had no interest in what was going on below, the fifteen policemen standing with their shoulders touching, ploughing through the water, turning stones over with their heavy-duty rubber gloves. Vicki was watching traffic go by, rumbling over the bridge.
Drawn into the tragedy now, Rose stood on tiptoe to see. Ethan was there out of a sense of duty, his stump chafing from standing too long. Fran and Frank stood with their four kids and a fifth, Nesta’s baby, wrapped in blankets and Fran’s arms so that she was three times her natural size. Andy strolled up and down the footpath behind everyone, unsure of his place. He had spoken only briefly to Vince. ‘You two know each other?’ Rose exclaimed. ‘What a small world this is!’
Vince made a start on his cans of lager. To keep me warm, he thought. It tasted of petrol. Why isn’t Andy talking to me more? he thought. He kept his eyes averted from the tattooed man who, it turned out, lived on Penny’s street. He was involved in his own intense, private debate with his mother-
in-law, standing a little way down the kerb. There are troubles everywhere, Vince thought.
Tony huddled into his anorak a little way apart, also watching cars.
So we’re all here, thought Penny. The Charge of the bloody Light Brigade.
The policeman looking up at them from the footpath below was joined by another, resigned and wiping his black gloves on his jacket. He shook his head. The line of fifteen gradually emerged from under the bridge. Everyone craned their necks to see them come out into the light, switching their torches off, cricking their backs unbent. From the spectators’ vantage they looked like an optical illusion, a thick black line through which the filthy water still flowed.
Nothing. Nothing suspicious down there.
Detective Inspector Collins strode briskly out of the tunnel, looked up at the onlookers’ gallery and addressed them. I notice she didn’t get in the Burn, thought Jane, who had taken a dislike to the woman.
‘We’re moving the area of the search outwards. You’ve all agreed to help and as long as the rain holds off, we’ll be glad of everyone here. If the weather takes a nasty turn, or it starts to get dark, please would you take your children home? The police force will not be liable for any accidents or damages. If you come down here I will assign you your areas.’
With Penny leading, they negotiated the gap in the wooden fence and, clutching branches and damp clumps of grass, they slithered one by one down the bank to the footpath.
There was a place in the Metro Centre where Liz particularly wanted to eat. They took an escalator right through Marks and Spencer without even getting off, cutting right through the cloying air, smiling at the pristine fresh foods, nodding politely at the uptight dummies and store detectives.
Imperiously Liz led the way through the Roman Emporium with its plaster statues of gods, its marble shop fronts. Eventually they came to the mock open-air restaurant which offered food from every corner of the globe, each corner having a special counter, the counters ranged like market stalls around the screwed-down tables. The place was seething and they had to fight to find a seat in the very middle.
Above them wheeled cranelike arms flung up from the indoor funfair. Screams of joy, fear and laughter played like music. But there was no one on the big wheel, no one whizzing about in the chairs or hovering in the hot-air balloons (on wires). It was a schoolday and the screaming was recorded.
‘What are we having to eat?’ Cliff asked, leafing through a sheaf of menus. ‘Italian? Chinese?’
‘Oh, a little bit of everything, I think.’ Liz left him with her bags — she had already bought a new frock — and headed off for the queues. ‘Excuse me barging in like this —’ she charmed her way through — ‘but I don’t want an entirely Portuguese meal, just a
