Three Things About Elsie(68)

‘You saw the long second, Florence. You told her to go to Whitby. Eileen Everest never went to Llandudno in the end. You stopped her.’





FLORENCE


The policeman held up his hands. He was clearly an optimist, because it hadn’t worked the last three times he’d tried it, so there was really very little chance of it working now.

‘If you could all just be quiet for one second,’ he said, ‘we’ll try to establish a system for speaking to everyone individually.’

But the second half of his sentence fell into a shouting match between two residents about whether a chief inspector was higher up than a superintendent.

‘Perhaps we could borrow one of the rooms?’ said Miss Ambrose.

The woman who owns the hotel was called Gail. Gail with an ‘i’. Each time she introduced herself, she explained to us it was spelled with an i, despite no one ever finding the need to write it down. Gail gave a little sniff. ‘Another one?’ she said. Miss Bissell had experienced a fainting episode next to the whalebones, and had already been taken into the kitchen with a police sergeant and a bottle of brandy.

‘Maybe the television room?’ said Miss Ambrose.

‘That’s out of the question. It’s Tuesday,’ said Gail, rather mysteriously, but she didn’t elaborate. ‘I suppose I could let you have the staff rest room. Although you’ll need to be out by eight, because I’ve got a new shift coming in and I’ll need to change my slacks.’

We sat in a row, waiting our turn. For a rest room, it wasn’t very restful. The chairs were wooden and mismatched. Some of them had clearly escaped from the dining room and clung to their usefulness with glue and Sellotape. People appeared and ignored us. They banged locker doors and turned keys, and they put on layers of uniform and turned themselves into someone else. I tapped my feet to pass the time, but Elsie kept glaring at me, and so I tapped my fingers on last night’s menu instead.

‘Where do you think Ronnie is?’ I kept saying. ‘Someone should be keeping their eye on him.’

‘He’ll be outside.’ Jack nodded towards the door. ‘Along with everyone else. He can’t get up to much with all these policemen around.’

‘Why don’t we play a game?’ Elsie said. ‘Why don’t we try that shelf over there?’

I studied the shelf. ‘Clock. Postcards. Dying plant.’ I hesitated. ‘Candle?’

‘Bigger,’ she said.

‘Candlestick?’

‘Wonderful!’

‘Professor Plum, in the conservatory.’ Then, ‘Why did I say that?’

‘Because it’s a board game,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? You play it in the day room sometimes, after small amounts of persuasion.’

‘Do I? I don’t remember. Where do you think Mrs Honeyman has gone?’

Elsie paused. ‘Perhaps she just got a little confused. Wandered off. People do from time to time.’

‘She’ll be back,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll see.’

I wasn’t sure if she would, but I didn’t say anything. Old people disappear all the time. We allow them a moment of sympathy, and then turn the page of the newspaper. Do we ever know if they’re returned to where they belonged? I’m not entirely sure that we do. Elsie started talking about how the plant on the shelf needed watering, and so I clung to that thought instead. Sometimes, you need to hold on to a small worry, to stop you from reaching out for something bigger.

Jack turned around in his seat and looked at the door for the sixth time.

‘It’s not going to make them move any faster, you know,’ Elsie said.

‘Being questioned by the police is the most exciting thing that’s happened in years,’ I said. ‘People won’t give it up without a fight.’

‘I don’t know why they need to speak to us anyway.’ Jack turned back to us. ‘We weren’t even there. We were in the music shop.’

I said, ‘As long as they don’t ask the reason we were in the music shop.’

‘Do you think they’ll want to know why?’ said Elsie.

‘It’s a free country,’ Jack said.

As he spoke, the staff-room door opened and the policeman ushered out the latest interviewee, who was still in the middle of a sentence.

‘… and that’s why I pay my taxes,’ he was saying.

The policeman nodded and blocked the way back with his shoulders. Jack struggled to his feet. ‘I’m next,’ he said.

But Handy Simon walked past us and slipped through.

‘Well I never did.’ Jack watched the door for a very long time. Even after it had closed.

I squinted at the shelf on the opposite wall. ‘I think I’m going to water that plant,’ I said.





HANDY SIMON


Handy Simon had never been a big fan of policemen. He was stopped by one once for having a tail-light out, and it took him three days to recover. It wasn’t so much the uniform, because he was used to his dad’s, it was the worry that he might be mistaken for someone else. Simon always thought he looked like the photofits on Crimewatch. There was something about his face. Something universal. He could never see it himself, but other people seemed to, so whenever he heard a loud bang, he’d look at the clock and make a mental note of what he was doing, just in case it turned out to be gunfire and he found himself sharing a cell with a tattooist called Daryl.