Random Acts of Unkindness (17 page)

She pushes the paper toward me. I look at Sean Connelly’s face, his eyes bulging with anger, staring from the front page. Inside there’s a double page spread of him handing over an oversized cheque to the local councillor. I flick through the pages. Darren’s death is reported on page twenty-three. I turn back to them.

‘So. Mothers for the Missing. Who runs it? And what do they do?’

‘It’s a woman called Pat Haywood. Her son Steven went missing twelve years ago, around the time of all that Shipman business, and he’s never been found. Oh. Sorry.’

I smile at her.

‘No. Go on.’

‘Some of them are mums of them lads who killed themselves. That’s the hardest of the lot, isn’t it?’

Sheila intervenes.

‘I don’t reckon. It’s the mums who never know. And the dads. It’s harder for them. Anyway, Pat’s there every day for a drop in. Never met her. Us pigs not allowed up there, are we?’

I smile around the table.

‘Thanks, ladies. And thanks for the breakfast.’

I get up and walk past the new cushions, big and fluffy, past the film channel—it’s
Pretty Woman
this time—past a new hedgehog boot scraper. I notice that they’ve cleared all the autumn leaves out of my garden and cut the last of the grass. It looks very neat. They’ve even spray cleaned my driveway and the back patio.

I look back at them and they’re sipping tea and watching Julia Roberts arrange herself across a piano. I wonder if they have any kids, any family. I wonder if they actually know what I’m going through. I suppose I did give them free range of the house, but I didn’t expect them to be here all night and day.

On the other hand, nothing had happened since they were here. No break-ins, no damage to my car. Not that I had any pets left to kill or maim. Or any children. Just me.

I drive over to the station and make a show of parking my car in the ops car park. Then I walk through the operations room and use my pass to go out the back and down the stairs to the archive rooms.

I take a file from the desk and stand on the chair under the CCTV, twisting it to the left so that it’s facing the door, but not facing the research area. Then I open the window and climb out, leaving it open a fraction for later. I pull up my black hoodie and walk across the grass at the side of the station and toward the tram, making sure I keep looking at the ground. I jump on the first tram that arrives and get off in the city centre.

I walk around the back streets as much as I can and, when I reach my destination, I take off the jacket and sling it over my bag, revealing a cream Fair Isle jumper. I head for reception in the social services building and flash my police card. The receptionist barely looks up and I keep looking forward. This isn’t my territory at all, but I need to know what happened to Bessy’s baby. The twin that I haven’t already seen.

Like the police archive centre, there are microfiche records. I quickly skim through them to find the right year. These records are filed by chronological cases, and I soon locate a baby that’s been abandoned on a doorstep.

There’s even a newspaper cutting attached, appealing for the mother to come forward. Of course, she never did. I follow the trails, a tiny baby turns into a toddler, fostered by someone in Duckenfield. Then adopted by a couple in Mosley. Went to junior school in Mosley, then to Ashton Grammar, then disappears from the social services records aged fourteen. Pauline Green. I wonder if she was ever told she was adopted? She’d be around fifty now, probably settled down with a family of her own.

I walk out of social services, pulling on the hoodie again. Over to the registry office, to find out if she married.

‘Pauline Green. No, sorry, I don’t have her date of birth, but she’d be late forties.’

The man behind the desk stares at me.

‘Any relation?’

I don’t know if it has to be for me to look, probably not, but I lie anyway.

‘Cousin. Thing is, I need to find her.’

He smiles.

‘Ah. Doing your family tree, are you?’

I nod.

‘Yeah. You got me there. I am.’

He flicks through several books and eventually comes to a wedding in 1973 between John Lewes and Pauline Green. He turns around and taps this into a computer.

‘You might be in luck. This woman’s been married for twenty-nine years. Still is. They live on Mosley Road.’ He looks at me, trying to see if I am for real. ‘Number ninety six.’

I smile.

‘Thank you so much. I’ve got a big surprise for her.’

It would be a big surprise when I turn up with forty thousand pounds. I get a bus to Northlands and walk up Acre Road toward the community centre. All the cameras are sprayed here and I wonder what would happen if I was spotted. It’s not likely, though.

They’re looking for a flash copper in a nice car, someone who looks like authority. Not some woman in Adidas trainers and a black hoodie. I could be anyone. I trudge along with my eyes on the floor, shoulders hunched, the trademark of downtrodden life on Northlands.

No one here has a spring in their step, and everyone owes Connelly something. He’s got protection down to a fine art; cause trouble then charge people to protect them from it. There are some people who work, mostly at Old Mill. Making kitchens, it seems. Or arranging for kitchens to be made. The rest of them are on the dole with a sideline. Selling drugs, ringing cars, protection.

But that’s only the men. Equality hasn’t quite reached Northlands, and the women sit in their pristine homes while their children are at school and the men are out doing whatever racket they are into. Or in the pub.

You won’t find Northlands women in the pub except for Saturday nights. There are barmaids obviously, but they are invisible women, there only for decorative purposes. Wives and girlfriends stay indoors. The last time I was here was to investigate a woman who had apparently killed her own children.

When Mike and I got to the house, she was sitting in the lounge in a forensics suit with blood still on her hands. The bodies of her two children, aged seven and five, were still upstairs. She had wounds to her lower arms, which she refused to have treated. She was just staring in front, straight ahead, but when I walked in she looked at me for a second.

When I’d been upstairs and seen the boy and girl, throats slit neatly as they lay in bed, not sign of a struggle, which later turned out to be due to an earlier dosage of Mogodon, I sat down on a buffet in front of her.

‘Why? Why have you done this?’

Mike tried to read a caution, but I held my hand up. She shook her head slightly.

‘I couldn’t let them live through this.’

‘What?’

I watched as her eyes covered the room.

‘This.’

She was taken to the station, but hanged herself in her cell. Later I found out that her husband had abused her two elder daughters from a previous marriage and had raped one of them, getting her pregnant, then passed the baby off as their youngest child, the little girl she had killed.

None of the girls or women in that scenario had reported any of it to the police, fearing for their lives if they did. In her case, it was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Either way you end up dead. Women in Northlands didn’t report, unless it was rows between neighbours, or missing children. The only place they are allowed to frequent are their own houses and the community centre.

It isn’t a centre as it’s at the far end of the estate. I follow the telegraph poles, keeping to the main road and eventually it’s looming in front of me, an oblong block made of uncovered breezeblocks. Why make something pretty if it’s somewhere as desperate as Northlands?

The steel door is half-open and I step inside. The hallway is covered with flyers for well baby clinics and smear tests. All the agencies know that this is the only place they can make contact with these forgotten women who never leave here, not even to go into the city nearby.

Northlands is built on a giant twelve-by-twelve grid, with a simple numbering system for the street names. Both those concepts are borrowed from much more successful places; Abu Dhabi is built on a grid and New York employs numbered avenues for location. I’ve been to both those places and nothing could be more different than Northlands.

The building is split into units around a big hall. Around fifty women sit around smoking and drinking coffee. Like feminism, the smoking ban hadn’t made it this far. I feel enormously healthy next to the sea of sallow skin.

There’s a notice board at the far end. I dodge a group of toddlers and navigate the baby weighing station to see if I can find Pat Haywood. Henna tattoos. Ear piercing. Vajazzle. For God’s sake. Pilates. Better. Right at the bottom is Mothers for the Missing.

There’s a little area of the notice board cordoned off, and pinned to it is a wreath of photographs, each with a golden pin through the corner. There must a hundred pictures, presumably of boys who have gone missing. I’m taking a risk here, I know. By placing myself in this group, I’m opening myself up to Connelly and if he has got Aiden it will look like I’m on his trail.

On the other hand, it might take a while until the news filters through and by then I’ll have the information I need. I’m lifting picture after picture, changing years, changing hairstyles, mostly young boys. Just like the archives say. I feel a movement behind me. I glance round, and there’s a woman standing very close to me.

‘What do you want?’

I stand my ground.

‘I’m Janet Margiotta. My son is missing.’

I’m figuring that the women on Northlands get most of their information about the world from Granada reports, so they won’t have heard anything about Aiden apart from my appeal.

‘On the telly, yeah. With your husband. Big. Bald. How old was your lad then?’

‘Is. He’s sixteen now. Fifteen when he went missing. That’s the thing. I want to join Mothers for the Missing. I need some help.’

She nods and her harsh face bends into a smile.

‘Right. Just sign here.’ She points to a slip of paper. ‘You sign for you and you sign for him. ’Ave you got a photo?’

I shake my head.

‘No. I can bring it next time.’

I sign the paper and she pins it to the side of the board, adding what, at first sight, looks like a lavish frill. But it’s not decorative; it’s a dense collection of gross sorrow and heartbreak. It’s proof of life, proof that the missing boys are alive in their mother’s hearts.

‘Come on then.’

She marches out of the hall and along a corridor. First, second, third door on the left. It opens up into a large common room, with a table tennis table in the middle. There are two TVs, both on and showing news channels.

The Mothers of the Missing are sitting around drinking coffee and chatting. All the women in the room look pale and dour, chins resting on elbows and hair scraped back. The Northlands uniform of synthetic tracksuits and trainers prevails. Pat sits down at the top table, which is four school desks dragged together.

‘OK. You can have the induction.’

She pulls out some sheets of paper and thrusts them in front of me. I look around the room, which is plastered with newspaper clippings, all in chronological order.

‘Are these all the boys who’ve gone missing?’

She sparks up a cigarette and nods.

‘Yeah. Going back to the sixties. This place has been going since then. The former Mr Connelly set it up with his money; it’s ours forever. We’ve got a trust fund to help families who’ve had someone go missing.’ She looks me over, acknowledging my expensive trainers and the teardrop diamond I always wear around my neck, my only jewellery. ‘But I don’t suppose you’ll be needing that, will you? You don’t live on Northlands, do you?’

I shake my head.

‘No. I live in Woodhouses. But Aiden. That’s my son. He had friends on Northlands.’

Pat nods. The whole audience focuses on me. It’s as if I have just sworn extremely inappropriately.

‘Has friends. Has. We never give up here. What do we have, ladies?’

I expect them to shout something, stand up, and be enthusiastic. But there’s a few strained voices, quietly repeating what they must have repeated hundreds of times since their children disappeared.

‘Hope.’

Empty hope. She rolls a ballpoint pen over to me and I fill in my name and address. I wonder how much Connelly has to do with this venture and how long it will be before the penny drops as to who I am. Pat’s staring at the form with a hungry look on her face as I complete it. When I’m done she snatches it. And stands up.

‘Aiden Margiotta. Aged fifteen at the time of his disappearance. Just before his sixteenth birthday.’ A murmur of sadness ripples around the room and I feel the tears sting. ‘Sixteen now, then. Went missing from his dad’s house, Mum last seen him the day before. Police informed. Case closed after an appeal and a resulting sighting in London.’

One of the women stands up.

‘Always the same. Case closed after a sighting.’

I wonder whether I should mention the CCTV and the boy, but then I would have to explain how I found all that out, and I don’t want to get caught in a lie. Pat continues.

‘OK, ladies. Oh and by the way, we’re not just ladies, we have some fathers here as well, not today, but sometimes we get a father. And it’s not just sons. Mainly, but there are a few missing daughters as well. So, Janet, what we do mainly is organise marches and the like to raise awareness of our sons and daughters and make sure that the police don’t give up on us. If we hear something, no matter how small, we report it. Even if the case is closed.’

I think back to the files. None of the closed cases had any notes added. None of these peoples’ reports had been filed.

‘From time to time, we see a report about a body found on the news. We keep the telly on all the time to check for it, ’cause they’re often hidden in regional news reports. And we keep track of all the papers. So all you need to do now is bring in a picture of your boy and we’ll add it to our list. Copy it and that, and send it round the estate. Have you been in touch with Missing People?’

I nod.

‘Yeah. I reported it to them and he’s on their website.’