Off Minor (19 page)

So it was that Geoffrey Morrison’s nose was first put firmly out of joint; dark-haired Geoffrey, well and truly three and relegated to the sidelines of adult activity and adoration.

“Who loves his baby brother, then?”

Not, Geoffrey would have been moved to answer, bloody me!

But time is a great healer and smoother; Geoffrey came to realize that younger brothers, like the large white dogs of family friends, do have their uses. And pleasures.

“Geoff’s so good with the baby,” his father would say, “He really is.”

And, the incident in their neighbor’s plastic paddling pool aside, Geoffrey did treat his younger brother with a great deal of care and consideration. One result of which was that baby Michael grew up worshipping his brother and would mope and cry forlornly whenever Geoffrey was taken from his sight.

“Michael Morrison,” Geoffrey would say, years later, in the course of an interview on Manx radio, “I love him like a brother!” And, once the laughter at his own joke had subsided, added, in all seriousness, “It was my brother, Michael, who was responsible for making me what I am today.”

Which was, at the then age of twenty-nine, a near-millionaire businessman with one fifth of the tear-off perforated plastic bag market in his pocket. “As it were,” he laughed to the mid-morning presenter, “I always was the kind of a man who had need of big pockets.”

The presenter pressed one corner of his mouth into a smile and cued up something by the Carpenters. Why was it always the biggest pillocks in the world who made the most money? And why did they always end up on his show?

“What I meant to say before,” Geoffrey said into the fuzzy end of the microphone, the last sighs of Karen Carpenter disappearing into the ether, “was that up until the day my brother was born, I thought the world owed me a living. I was an only child, idolized, waited on hand and foot. Suddenly—wham!—there’s this new model and I’m stuck on the back of the shelf, remaindered. Which was when, and I swear this, all of—what?—three and a bit years old, I realized if the world didn’t owe me a living, I was going to have to get up off my behind and make one for myself. And I’ll tell you,” winking at the man behind the console, who said the rest of it along with him, “I’ve never looked back since.”

And it was true.

Not even when he badly overextended his borrowing in ’87 and was obliged to call in a receiver. Before the ink was dry on that particular bankruptcy declaration, Geoffrey was registering another company under his wife’s name. Within a month, he had signed an exclusive contract to supply a northern supermarket company with plastic bags for its new range of serve-yourself fruit and veg. Geoffrey had grinned and bought a new Rover, sent his wife for a fortnight’s rest and restoration at Ragdale Hall and achieved similar effects for himself with a course of vitamin injections and a discreet Asian masseuse moonlighting from the Star Sun Lounge, Stockport.

For the next year he played one bank off against another, changed his accountant about as often as most men change their boxer shorts and faked a time and motion study at his main factory to persuade his largely immigrant work force to take a cut in pay. Back on top and in danger of becoming too conspicuously solvent, Geoffrey moved house and home some forty miles off the mainland to the Isle of Man. Here, from a six-bedroomed extravaganza on Bradda Head, he could enjoy fresh air, an uninterrupted view across the sea to Ireland and significantly lower tax levels. A private plane, shared with a select group of like-minded businessmen, meant that he could be back among the action inside the hour.

At forty, Geoffrey Morrison had a half-share in a couple of race horses, a steadily improving golf handicap, an open line of credit at a casino in Douglas and several photographs of himself shaking hands with the stars—Frankie Vaughan, Clinton Ford, Bernie Winters. He wore tailored suits, beneath which he flaunted brightly colored braces, wide silk ties and a relatively flat stomach. Half an hour in the pool three times a week, doing lengths, that and the exercise bike he rode while he was dictating memos.

When he arrived at his brother’s house, the morning after Michael had returned from the hospital, Geoffrey was wearing a light gray suit with a dark red stripe, midnight blue braces and a tie in which the predominant colors were yellow and orange. The milkman was still delivering further around the crescent and the lights of the hire car that had met Geoffrey at the airport were still shining. Even the media had yet to arrive.

“Lorraine, sweetheart! You poor darling, what a thing to have happened. It’s too much to hope there’s any news? And Michael. Where’s Michael? My God! What’ve you done to yourself? You’re limping.”

Oblivious to his brother’s embarrassment, Geoffrey took him in his arms and hugged him tightly; Lorraine, red-eyed, looking on.

“I don’t understand …” Michael began,

“Of course you don’t. How could you? A thing like this, your own child, how could you be expected to understand? How could anyone? Lorraine, sweetheart, you don’t mind me saying so, but you look awful.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Michael said. “I meant you. What are you doing here?”

Geoffrey’s eyes widened with surprise. “The fact neither of you thought to ring me, I can live with. Put it down to the surprise, shock. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I came as soon as I could.”

“Geoffrey, I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” Michael said. “I just didn’t think. I haven’t been able to think about anything. But, really, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Do? A time like this.” He caught hold of Lorraine’s hands and squeezed. “I knew I had to be with you, for now at least, express my sympathy, show how I felt. How we both feel, Claire and myself.”

Lorraine had seen Michael’s brother no more than twice before the wedding, four or five times after. For the wedding, Geoffrey had sent a small truckload of presents from Harrods, worn a white three-piece suit and had the time of his life splashing champagne into the guests’ glasses, dancing with anyone who was fool enough to let him, trying in vain to persuade Michael to join him on the small stage in “All I Have to Do is Dream,” the Morrison Brothers in close harmony, Geoffrey singing lead. “Come on, Michael. We used to sing this all the time at home, remember?” Michael swore to Lorraine later he didn’t recall singing it once.

They had made one visit over to the island, a week during most of which Geoffrey had been called back to one business meeting or another, leaving Lorraine and Michael in the company of Geoffrey’s wife, Claire, and the seals that splashed off the rocks into the coldness of the sea. Since Claire’s routine seemed to consist of rising in time for lunch and then immersing her nose in
Home and Garden
or the new Jilly Cooper, the seals proved rather the better company.

That aside, Geoffrey had descended on them occasionally; usually unannounced, staying long enough to drink a cup of tea, make a few phone calls and rebuke Michael for his lack of ambition.

“Lorraine,” Geoffrey was saying, “what’re the chances of you rustling us all up some breakfast? Times like this, we need to hit the carbohydrates as hard as we can.”

Touching a hand to Lorraine’s back, he shepherded them towards the kitchen. “And you,” he said, looking sideways at Michael, “what the hell have you managed to do to your leg?”

Twenty-seven

Jack Skelton had a freshly jaded look, suffering as he had from his daughter’s latest breakfast sport. The game was easy and there didn’t seem to be too many rules. The way it was played was to come into the kitchen smiling, brush a kiss across your father’s cheek on the way to the Rice Pops, then open the daily paper at the home news, pages two and three. “Oh, look, Dad, I see you’ve snatched all the headlines again. Black man awarded forty thousand after police beat him up in a racist frenzy and then made up a case against him. Another ESDA test shows officers changed their interview notes to secure a conviction. Accusations of perjury after the police’s own video of a demonstration showed evidence of arrest bore little or no relationship to what had actually happened.” All of this delivered in the cheery, upbeat manner of Radio One. “Envy you your job satisfaction, Dad. Knowing how much you’re respected, admired, working for the good of the community.”

Skelton knew what would happen if he argued, tried to explain. The smiles would disappear and in their place would be the face he recognized from their battles of a year before. Only this time, Kate older, the result would be different. How much it would take to drive her from the comparative comfort of her home to join her boyfriend in some squalid shared house or squat he didn’t know, but he realized it wasn’t much. He knew he was being tested and the importance of not being found wanting. A small-scale domestic equivalent of the taunting his officers suffered at the hands of the pickets in the mining strike of ’84. As Kate delighted in pointing out, the repercussions of that were still being heard, violent retaliation, loss of control.

Skelton was not about to lose control.

He cracked his knuckles as he sat behind his desk, rain whipping against the glass outside. Opposite him, Resnick slumped cross-legged, tired, a piece of toilet tissue hanging from the side of his face where he had cut himself shaving.

Skelton straightened the papers on his desk with the eye of a precision engineer. “This woman up in Yorkshire, the bookseller …

“Jacqueline Verdon.”

“… no chance she’s pulling the wool over Patel’s eyes? Mother and daughter stashed away.”

“Behind the false bookshelf?”

“Something like that.”

“Bit Sherlock Holmes, isn’t it?”

“But possible.”

Resnick uncrossed his legs and according to some strange symbiosis, his stomach rumbled loudly. “Patel reckons she was genuinely distressed, concerned. She could be faking it, but, on the whole, I’d back the lad’s judgment. All the same, we have had a word with the local station, asked them to keep an eye.”

“And she’d no idea, this Verdon, where Diana Wills might have shot off to?”

Resnick shook his head. “What she did bear out, Lorraine Morrison’s tales of Diana getting increasingly disturbed. For a couple of months now she’s been harping on about her kid; not Emily, a boy she had. Apparently, she’d been talking, Diana, about moving up there permanently. Hebden. Jacqueline Verdon’d been trying to convince her to give it a go.”

“Maybe she leaned too hard.”

“Could be, sir.”

Skelton went over to the window, stared down into the street and the two lines of vehicles, almost unbroken, in and out of the city. Diana Wills could be anywhere by now and her daughter the same: together or apart. What did it do to a woman, the court taking away one child after the first had already been lost? Knowing she was there but unable to see her other than at the times laid down. All that he put up with from Kate to keep her another year at most.

“Gut feeling, Charlie?”

For a moment Resnick closed his eyes. “Mother’s gone off somewhere, feels she can’t cope. I don’t believe she’s got the daughter with her.”

His eyes open again now, both men looking at one another, aware of what that meant.

Geoffrey Morrison had arranged a surprise call on a couple of factories where he had work subcontracted. Catch them with their trousers down; keep them up to the mark. While Lorraine was still clearing away the breakfast things, he got Michael to one side and, not for the first time, offered him a place in the business. A year, eighteen months, you could be running the UK distribution, double your present salary, you’d be responsible only to me. As usual, Michael promised he would think about it. All he was thinking about was Emily: where she might be, what had happened to her. All the while he was trying to suppress the pictures of that other unfortunate girl that kept imprinting themselves, like sun spots, behind his eyes.

Resnick walked into the Gents to find Millington adjusting his fly and whistling the theme from the Elgar Cello Concerto. Well, it made a change from
Oklahoma.

“Wife doing classical music this term, Graham?”

“English art, sir. Plays all that stuff to get herself in the mood. Real catchy, some of it.”

“In the Mood,” Resnick was thinking, Joe Loss’s signature tune. One of the first times he and Elaine went dancing, stumbling over one another’s feet to a pumped up version of “The March of the Mods” at the old Palais.

“You all right, sir?”

Resnick nodded.

“Looked as if you were in a bit of pain. Not prostate problems, I hope?” Millington left, smiling maliciously, Resnick scarcely noticing, certain now that he knew where they would find Diana Wills.

“Who was it you wished to see?” asked the duty officer at the desk.

“For the second and I hope the last time,” sneered Geoffrey Morrison, “the senior officer in charge of investigating the disappearance of my niece.”

“That would be Emily Morrison, would it, sir?”

“Wonderful, officer. One of the new graduate entrants, I’m delighted to see.”

“There’s Inspector Resnick or Superintendent Skelton, sir. Which would you be wanting?”

Geoffrey Morrison counted to fifty in tens. “Which do you think?”