Ramsay 06 - The Baby-Snatcher (15 page)

‘Put it away for Marilyn,’ she said. ‘For the next time there’s a school trip. Kath would have liked that.’

With the wheel out of the way the front room looked really grubby so she’d given it a good clean. She scrubbed the paintwork and shampooed the carpet. There was a nasty stain in front of the grate which she’d never noticed before, but it came up as good as new. She opened the windows for the first time ever, washed the curtains, bought a bunch of daffs on her weekly trip to the supermarket and stuck them in a milk jug on the coffee table.

If Bernie and Marilyn noticed the change they didn’t comment.

They did comment on her cooking, though. She cooked a meal every evening. A proper meal. Kathleen always claimed to be too busy to cook. Too disorganized, Claire thought. Too wrapped up in Marilyn and her own improving evening classes. There had never been much except beans on toast or pizza. For a woman who despised modern machines, Kath had taken very easily to the freezer and the microwave. She didn’t really think food mattered.

Claire thought food mattered a lot. Now, when Emma Coulthard went shopping to the supermarket on the Otterbridge bypass she asked if she might go too. She filled a trolley with fresh meat and vegetables, cheese and crusty bread. Sometimes she bought treats, taking the money from her wages, not the housekeeping – sticky buns for her and Marilyn and a couple of cans of beer for Bernard. Every evening when she got home she started to prepare the meal. She enjoyed planning for it. She had cooked for her father since she started secondary school. Now she would cook for Marilyn and Bernard.

Tonight the detour to Kim Houghton’s house had made her later than usual. She hurried up the poorly lit street eager to begin. It was almost six o’clock. A sliver of light showed where a neighbour’s upstairs curtain was pulled back but she took no notice. Let them talk, she thought. I’ve nothing to hide.

She let herself into the house. Marilyn was in the back room. She had drawn the curtains but she was still wearing her coat.

‘Have you only just got here?’ Claire kept her voice cheerful. Marilyn had put up with enough interrogation from Kath. ‘That’s the second time this week you’ve been late.’

‘Choir practice again. I got the five thirty bus. Is there anything I can do?’

Claire shook her head. The kitchen was her territory now. She didn’t want Marilyn muscling in. Besides, Marilyn was bright. A couple of years and she’d be away to university if she passed her exams. She should be doing her homework.

Tonight, however, Marilyn didn’t take her books straight upstairs. She hovered in the doorway to the kitchen.

‘Claire.’

‘Yes?’ Claire had put on an apron over her working clothes and had already started to peel potatoes. She’d bought some nice slices of lambs’ liver the day before. She’d cook them slowly with a rich gravy and lots of onions. Her dad had always liked liver done that way. He’d shown her how to do it.

‘I was wondering…’ Marilyn spoke uncertainly. She was fiddling with the strap of her school bag. ‘I was wondering whether we might rent a television. I’ve been asking round. It wouldn’t cost very much.’

‘You’d have to ask your dad.’

‘But you could put in a word. He’d listen to you.’

Claire smiled. ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

‘I’ll go up then. Do some violin practice before I start my essay.’

Claire splashed vegetable oil into a frying pan and slid in chopped onions from a board. She shook flour on to a plate and picked up the liver slices, turning them with a deft movement to cover both sides with flour, then she rinsed her hands under the tap.

Above the sound of violin scales she heard the front door open. Although Claire could not see the hall from where she was standing in the kitchen, she could imagine what was happening. Bernard would have propped his bike against the outside of the house while he unlocked the door, then he would wheel it in to stand at the foot of the stairs. Kath had wanted him to keep it in the old privy in the back yard but for once in his life he had stood up for himself and refused. He’d said anyone could steal if from there and didn’t Kath realize he’d be lost without his bike.

Claire could see his point but if she decided to decorate they might have to make a different arrangement. The rubber end of the handle bar had made a terrible mark on the wallpaper, and quite often there was mud on the carpet.

The front door was slammed shut and Bernard walked through to the kitchen. His cheeks were flushed from exercise and the wind. He beamed at Claire.

‘Something smells good.’

In his hand was a plastic lunch box. Claire had taken to making sandwiches for him before he set out to work. He tipped crumbs into the bin, then set it on the draining board.

Claire turned from the cooker to face him.

‘I’m going out tonight,’ she said. ‘Kim Houghton’s asked me to babysit.’

‘Oh.’

‘I thought you and Marilyn would like some time on your own.’

‘Yes,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I see.’

‘You should get to know her better. It’s important.’

‘I ought to practise,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m doing a party in Otterbridge on Saturday. A Sunday school. They said they’d understand if I wanted to cancel but I couldn’t let them down and it doesn’t do to get rusty.’

‘You
ought
to talk to Marilyn. About her mother. About the future.’

‘Oh no, not yet. Now wouldn’t be the right time at all.’ Panic made him sweat. He wiped his forehead and his upper lip with a handkerchief. ‘Of course I will tell her, but later, when things have settled down a bit.’

Claire shrugged and turned back to stir the frying pan. She knew with Bernard it was no good pushing.

‘Look,’ he said in an attempt to get back into her good books. ‘Perhaps Marilyn would like to help me practise. She always used to, when she was little.’

And Claire was pleased to see, on her way upstairs to get tidied up before going to Kim’s, that father and daughter were working together on Bernie’s magic. She looked in on the scene with satisfaction. Bernie had brought his box of magic tricks into the warm of the back room and Marilyn was sitting on the floor beside his chair sorting through a pack of playing cards. Not really enjoying it, Claire could see, but making the effort. Altogether she thought things were going very well.

It was only as she paused in the hall to put on her coat and glanced into the front room, where all trace of Kathleen had been removed, that she was reminded of a picture in a book she had been given as a child. When she turned to look at herself in the gilt-edged mirror by the door, the thought of the picture remained. It was of a large brown cuckoo with a bright eye and powerful claws tipping a smaller fledgling from a nest. She had been expected to feel sorry for the fledgling, but it had been the cuckoo which had caught her imagination.

Ramsay and Hunter were outside six Cotter’s Row at eight o’clock. Exactly. Ramsay wanted Claire to know that they were taking her seriously. She let them in as soon as they’d rung the bell and Hunter made a joke about her rushing them in before the neighbours could see she was entertaining two strange men. Ramsay wasn’t sure how she’d take that. He’d gained the impression of someone prim, old before her time. But although she didn’t smile she answered Hunter in the same lighthearted vein.

‘They’re used to strange men turning up on the pavement outside this house.’

Then she gave a giggle and Ramsay saw that Hunter had already managed to establish a slightly flirtatious rapport.

She was very comfortable in the house. She might have lived there.

‘Tea?’ she asked. ‘Coffee? Kim wouldn’t mind, I’m sure.’

‘Tea, then,’ Ramsay said. ‘Thanks.’

She was still wearing her respectable working clothes: a long black cord skirt with opaque black tights underneath and flat shoes; a white cotton shirt done right up to the neck. The effect was severe, that of an Edwardian school mistress or a nun in mufti. Not the type Hunter would usually have gone for at all, but he had slipped into chat-up mode without any apparent effort.

She brought out the tea on a tray, with sugar in a bowl and milk in a jug. The tray had already been laid in the kitchen. Ramsay wondered if she had brought the milk jug from home. It didn’t match the cups. It was clear she wanted to make a good impression.

‘You not having one, then?’ Hunter asked. As she set the tray on the low coffee table he saw she had dark, rather masculine eyebrows. Like two bloody caterpillars, he thought, crawling across her forehead. ‘ You shouldn’t have bothered just for us.’

‘That’s all right.’ She knew there was a can of Coke in the fridge. She would treat herself to that afterwards.

‘How can you help us, Claire?’ Ramsay asked. ‘You
do
think you can help us?’

She hesitated and for a moment he thought he had jumped in too quickly. At last she spoke.

‘Certain information has come into my possession.’ It was clear she had practised that bit.

‘And you think this information might help us find the murderer of your sister?’

‘I’m not saying that. I just think you should know.’

‘Of course.’ He paused. ‘You can trust us, you know, not to jump to conclusions.’

‘I feel responsible, you see, for my children.’ Then, fearing they might have misunderstood. ‘I mean the children I look after.’

‘You mind the Coulthard bairns, don’t you?’ Hunter said. ‘Three kids under five. I bet they’re a handful for a young lassie like you.’

‘Young children are only a problem if you don’t know what you’re doing.’ Her response was unexpectedly tart. ‘I had two years’ training, before they let me loose on kids. Most parents don’t have anything, do they?’

The question was flashed at Hunter who seemed uncertain how to answer. He couldn’t understand what he had done to upset her.

‘What sort of parent was Kath?’ Ramsay asked quietly.

‘You’re not here to talk about that.’

‘There’s no hurry is there? Gordon and I have all evening. We really would very much value your opinion. As a qualified childcare worker.’

At first Ramsay thought she would refuse to answer. She had her own agenda for the evening’s interview. But finally she could not resist.

‘If Kath had been my mother I’d have died.’ It was said flatly, without any emotion.

‘Why?’

‘Well, I didn’t have it easy but at least my dad wasn’t
weird.
’

‘What do you mean?’

She ignored Ramsay and turned to Hunter. ‘
You
can’t be too old to remember. When you’re a kid you don’t want to be different. Not in any way. It’s the most important thing. It was bad enough for me. No mother and money tight all the time. If I have kids I won’t put them through that. They’ll have the same as everyone else. Nike trainers and whatever brand of jeans they want, even if it means me doing without. Dad didn’t understand, but at least I didn’t have a mother like Kath to show me up. She got it
all
wrong.’

‘In what way?’ Ramsay asked. She answered him angrily as if he’d interrupted a private conversation between her and Hunter.

‘In every way. She wore dreadful clothes. She went into school and made a fuss. She said Marilyn wasn’t getting enough homework! She was the only mother to turn up to Sports Day so everyone stared.’ She stopped in mid-flow and continued more quietly. ‘The worst thing is that she didn’t realize. She thought Marilyn appreciated the effort. Perhaps you can’t understand. Perhaps it’s not the same for boys.’

Ramsay thought it was very much the same for boys. There had been a lad from his village who had gone to the grammar school at the same time as him. His mother had suffered from a mental illness. She had probably been schizophrenic, though at the time she had only been labelled barmy. In primary school the boy had spoken about his mother having to go into St George’s, the local psychiatric hospital. Later he learned not to mention it at all.

Once, coming home in the school bus down a narrow road leading to the pit village where Ramsay lived they had come across the woman. It was summer and she had picked a bunch of wild flowers from the hedgerow. She was dancing in the middle of the road, throwing the blooms one by one into the air. The driver had pushed on his horn and muttered darkly about maniacs who should be locked up. The boys whistled and yelled. Eventually the woman, still apparently unaware of the bus, moved to the side of the road.

The boy had said nothing. He had shown no concern for his mother’s safety. His only response has been to send a desperate, pleading glance towards Ramsay, begging him not to betray his secret. Then he had laughed at the woman with the rest of them.

Ramsay, who had never quite been one of the crowd, was tempted for a moment to jeer at the boy and give him away. He was still proud that he hadn’t. Now he was trying to come to grips with Marilyn’s feelings for her mother.

‘I see that it can’t have been easy for her,’ he said to Claire. ‘Kath must have seemed quite different from the other girls’mothers, but they always seemed very close to me. I mean, there were never any rows, were there? Disagreements, perhaps, but no real bust-ups.’

He thought that in all the hours Kath and her daughter had spent walking together they must have developed an understanding. And unlike the schizophrenic’s son, Marilyn had cared more about her mother’s safety than feeling foolish. She had knocked on the door of a stranger, panic-stricken, when she thought her mother was missing.

‘Well,’ Claire said. ‘Kath was lucky. Marilyn’s not the rebellious type.’

‘And Bernard?’ Hunter asked, allowing himself a little risque grin. ‘Was he rebellious?’

‘Bernard was devoted to Kath,’ Claire said.

‘They never had any arguments?’

‘He’s not the type to row. You’ll have seen that for yourself.’

‘Deep, then.’

‘I’ve told you. He was devoted.’

They sat for a moment in silence. The sound of next door’s television came through the wall.

‘Tell me, Claire, what did you do on the Saturday evening after Kath disappeared?’

Ramsay knew he was playing a dangerous game. Claire was itching to pass on her information. Making her wait might make her lose her cool. She might give away more than she intended. Or she might clam up altogether just to spite him.