Still Waters (Charlie Resnick #9)(72)
Some people, he knew, invented rose-tinted versions of their past; lives spent together in barely screened dislike and studied acrimony became, with the benefit of time and absence, near idyllic passages of mutual bliss. What he remembered were the petty rows, the jealousies, arguments about the bill that she forgot to pay, the meal he missed; what he saw in her face were want and pain, when the wanting was no longer for him and the pain was his to share.
He could still remember the carelessness of Elaine’s infidelity, like a child who can’t say no to sweets.
A vague geography of the town coming back to him, he turned left in front of the small municipal park, right again at the top of the street, and parked. Walking down past still impressive Georgian houses set well back from the road, he cut through onto Back St. Hilda’s Terrace, then down again into one of the narrow yards, snug there, almost hidden above the outer harbor.
The house he was looking for had flowers spilling from hung baskets and window boxes, the already small windows cloistered behind pink and white petals.
He wasn’t sure what he had expected of Diane Harker from their sparse conversations on the phone, but possibly not this trim woman in cut-off blue jeans, a lemon top knotted above the waist, and violently bleached blonde hair that sprang wildly from around her head. If there was a resemblance to her elder sister, Resnick could not see it yet.
A small child—a boy he thought, though he was less than certain—sat on Diane’s right hip, supported by her arm, and a second child, a girl of three or four, clung to her other hand.
“You found it all right, then?” she said, glancing at his warrant card.
“Yes.”
“People get lost.”
“I can imagine.”
“You’d best come inside. But mind your head.”
Resnick negotiated the first beam but not the second, the hard edge grazing away a good square inch of skin. He had the grace not to cry out or complain. The room was small yet somehow bright, every surface above four-year-old height crammed with ornaments and photographs, postcards rearranged into surreal collages, pieces of weathered driftwood in the shapes of fish or birds. A one-eared cat, the color of pale marmalade, sat, sphinx-like, on the arm of the one easy chair. The elder of the two children sat on the bottom tread of the curving stairs, jiggling a faceless doll in her lap.
Diane pushed a mug of herbal tea into Resnick’s hands. The younger child was nuzzling her breast. “We’ll go out,” she said. “In a minute. It’ll be easier to talk.”
They walked toward the West Pier, slow progress between the fish dock and the tat and glitter of amusement arcades and shops selling Whitby rock or doughnuts, six for a pound. Outside the Magpie Café, where he and Elaine had eaten gargantuan plaice and chips, followed by hazelnut meringue, Resnick bent low to retie the little girl’s shoe, for all the world, in his loose dark suit and flowered tie, like a flustered uncle come to visit.
Diane stood jiggling the small boy—it was a boy—on her hip and talking to him in a low voice: seagull, fisherman, boat.
At the lifeboat station, they crossed the street and walked past the wooden bandstand, out onto the pier, Resnick asking Diane about her family and hearing a familiar tale of jealousies and jumbled expectations. The oldest child, the brother, who did well at school and university, leaving three sisters uncertain in his wake. While James was successfully pursuing wife and career, the oldest daughter was poised to bury herself beneath the hard work and constant grind of being a farmer’s wife, and the next, Jane, had a secure job and was respectably married, even if she had failed to provide the necessary grandchildren by the expected time.
“And you?” Resnick asked.
“I was the one who bunked off from school, started going out with boys when I was thirteen, got drunk on Southern Comfort and cider, smoked, sniffed glue. It’s a wonder, as my dear mother never tired of telling me, I didn’t get into more serious trouble than I did.” She glanced across at him. “I didn’t even get pregnant till I was seventeen.”
“But …” Resnick was looking at the four-year-old, skipping up ahead.
“Oh, I had an abortion. More than one. Funny, really, Mum being a midwife and all. A miscarriage at twenty-one.” She laughed, the sound silvering away, brittle, on the wind. “I was beginning to think I’d be like Jane, never have kids at all. That was before I met their father. He painted some Pentecostal sign on my belly and played Jimi Hendrix at full volume. Oh, of course, he had to stick it in as well. Worked first time, just about.”
“He’s not still around?” Resnick asked.
“I think he heard voices telling him to move on. The last we heard he was living in a bothy on the Isle of Mull and practicing white magic. Presumably on the sheep.”
“And you stayed here.”
“I like it. Besides, I was pregnant again at the time. Making up for Jane.” She stopped and there were tears in her eyes. “God, poor Jane!” She shifted the child across to her other hip, tugging a tissue from the pocket of her jeans. “If anything awful was going to happen to anyone, you’d have thought it was going to be me. All the stupid things I used to get up to, the risks I took. And Jane, I doubt she took a serious risk in her life—you can’t even include Alex, he wasn’t a risk, he was just a bloody mistake. So how, how does she end up the way she did? How does she end up bloody dead?”