Instead of an answer, Elder slid the bottle back in her direction. 'You ever had any kids?'
Karen shook her head.
'Before Katherine was born, when Joanne was pregnant, people would tease us, you know, half-joking, about sleepless nights, how your life's never going to be your own. What they don't tell you, how the minute they take their first step, kids, away from you, on their own, you've got this fear about what's going to happen to them. I don't mean paedophiles, things like that, just ordinary everyday things like stepping off the kerb at the wrong moment, falling off the top of the slide and cracking their head open. And then you start to worry about yourself. Mortality. Dying. Stuff you'd hardly thought about before. Like what happens if you're running up this hill, pushing them in the buggy, just the two of you in the park, and suddenly you have a heart attack and they're left alone.'
Karen topped up Elder's glass and then her own.
She'd affected not to notice the tears that had come momentarily to his eyes.
'She is all right, though? Your daughter? Katherine, is that what you said she was called?'
'Katherine, yes.'
'And she's okay?'
'That depends.'
'Something like that, it can't be easy. Not for either of you.'
'I don't know how to talk to her. Not now. Perhaps I never did. No. No, that's not true. I think we got on pretty well. Even after Joanne and I had split up. We could talk to one another then. But now, I don't know what to say to her, how to be with her, even, and as far as she's concerned, the less she has to do with me the better.'
Karen smiled with her eyes. 'You know what, Frank?'
'No, what?'
'You're feeling sorry for yourself.'
'Probably.'
'More so than you are for her.'
'That's not true.'
'It's the way it comes across.'
'Too bad.' Angry, he pushed back his chair and went towards the window.
Karen sat where she was, head down, then went to join him. 'I didn't mean to upset you.'
'You didn't.'
Her breath was warm on his face.
'I think I'm a little drunk, Frank.'
'Most likely.'
'How about you?'
'Me? I'm fine.'
'Earlier, when you asked about this afternoon. Letting it get under my skin…'
'You don't have to tell me, you know.'
'No, it's okay.' She took another taste from her glass. 'When I was younger, not long out of school, doing some part-time college thing, I started going with this guy. Older than me. Quite a bit. He was a musician. Well, not even that. More a hanger-on, you know. Scarcely played at all. Did a bit of DJing, nothing special. But me, I was just a kid. What did I know? There's all my mates, you know, want to watch out, he's just out for what he can get. Well, he had that, didn't he, and we still carried on seeing one another. I'd go round, sleep over, stay weekends. My parents – I was still living at home – they were going ballistic, but I didn't care. Get your nose out of my business, let me live my own life, all that bullshit. Course, they were right. I turned up late one night, somewhere I was supposed to be meeting him, this club. All right, I was fifty minutes, nearly an hour late. He smacked me round the mouth, right there in front of everyone. Smacked me round the mouth and made it bleed. Next day he came round, all apologies, bought me this bracelet, expensive, you know, not cheap. Talked about moving in together, getting engaged.'
A wan smiled crossed Karen's face. 'Was a whole month before he hit me again. At a party this time. In front of all these people we knew. As if he needed to show he could.'
'You stopped seeing him,' Elder said. 'After that.'
'Not soon enough.'
'I'm sorry.'
Karen shook her head. 'That poor woman, in that huge great bloody house.'
'She got away,' Elder said. 'Started a new life.'
'Did she?'
'People do,' Elder said, knowing, even as he spoke, he was wishing that, for Katherine, it was true.
'I'd better phone for a taxi,' Karen said. 'Pick up my car tomorrow.'
'I could drive it in for you.'
'Okay.'
Neither of them moved.
His arm was not quite touching hers. And then it was.
Leaning forward, she kissed softly him on the mouth, then stepped away, 'This isn't going to happen, Frank. I'm sorry.'
A slow release of breath. 'Okay.'
Fishing her mobile from her bag, she punched in a number, spoke and listened, broke the connection. 'Twenty minutes.'
'I'll make coffee.'
'Good.'
Twenty minutes was fifteen. 'Kennet,' Karen said at the door. 'Tomorrow morning we'll see his girlfriend. The one he went with to Spain.'
For some time after she had gone, Elder could smell her scent in the room, recall the warmth of her arm, the slight pressure of her lips, barely opening. Foolish to pour himself a nightcap before turning in, but who was to know?
26
Vanessa had been thinking about Maddy. Oh, not constantly, far from it: too busy for that. A gang of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, bored by the school holiday, had been entertaining themselves by chucking stones from the pedestrian bridge between Churchill and Ingestre Roads down on to the trains below. On the last occasion they had shattered the windscreen, injuring the driver seriously, twenty-seven fragments of glass having to be removed from his face and neck. Then there were the two fifteen-year-olds who, three times in a week, had robbed a local newsagent of the contents of his till, once making their getaway on stolen bikes, twice on skateboards. To say nothing of a plethora of burglaries that needed checking into and logging, crime numbers to be assigned, anxious or angry people to reassure, the whole tedious and largely pointless business set in some kind of motion.
Still, through it all, there were moments, unbidden, when she would remember Maddy's laugh, Maddy's smile, Maddy's fear. It's not funny. It's not some bloody joke. No joke at all in the end, no joke at all. A statistic, a tragedy, a headline for as long as it was news; the object of an inquiry going nowhere, an absence, a pall of blue-grey smoke rising into the winter air.
Even at that time of the evening, too late for the last stragglers returning home from work, too early for the raucous and the semi-drunk on their way back from the pub or off for a night's clubbing, she had to push her way through to the doors when the Tube pulled into the Archway. An elbow at her back. A face along the platform she half-recognised. Nobody.
Coming up out of the station, uncomfortably aware of the waft of her own sweat, she walked through the usual congregation of beggars and Big Issue sellers colonising the pavement, and joined the small crowd of people waiting at the lights. Sometimes she took her life in her hands and crossed against the red, traffic bearing down
