The Sleeping and the Dead

She waited until about five o’clock when they had their meal break together and she could get him on his own. They sat in the little staff-room which led off the kitchen. They propped the outside door wide open and sat beside it on old bar stools, their plates on their knees, looking out at the pavement. Families were already trailing back from the beach, the children fractious and covered in sand, the parents loaded with towels and toys. There was the hot smell of drying seaweed and frying onions from the burger stall at the fair.

‘What was going on yesterday, Frank?’

‘What do you mean?’ He was defensive. He had the same unfocused look in his eyes as when he’d been talking to Porteous. She thought: But he can’t be scared of me. Frank had always been the boss. He knew everything there was to know about running a bar. She’d been the dippy teenager who couldn’t pour a decent pint, who couldn’t get up in the mornings, who turned into work with seconds to spare. He teased her and poked fun in a slightly flirty way which kept her wary. Something new was going on here which she didn’t quite understand. The power in the relationship had shifted.

‘Well, it didn’t look as if you were being particularly cooperative,’ she said, carefully keeping her voice neutral.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Don’t you want to catch the bloke who killed Mel?’

‘I don’t think the chap that came in that night did kill her.’

‘How did you know that, Frank?’

He shook his head, a refusal to answer.

‘If you knew anything you should have told the police.’

An open-top bus rattled past. A party of kids on the top deck all held helium-filled balloons. Rosie imagined the bus rising slowly in the air, carried slowly out to sea. Frank took a mouthful of sandwich, muttered something which she couldn’t make out.

‘What was that?’ Sharply. Sounding like her mother trying to teach him table manners.

‘I said I’ve had dealings with the police. I know what they’re like. They’d set me up given half a chance. Best policy’s not to say anything.’

‘Nobody’s saying you’d ever harm Mel. Why would you?’

He turned to her. Grateful, sad puppy eyes were focused properly on hers for the first time. ‘I’ve got a record. That’d be enough for them.’

She hadn’t known about the record. Again she looked at him in a new light. She wondered what he’d been done for and if he’d ever been inside. She imagined him in Stavely asking her mother to find him books, then thought she couldn’t see him as the reading type.

‘But they’ll know you couldn’t have done it. You were working the night she disappeared.’

‘Only until closing time. I could have done anything after that. I live upstairs on my own, don’t I? Lisa won’t let the kids come to stay any more.’

Lisa was his ex. It was an old complaint. Rosie was irritated by the self-pity but she tried not to show it.

‘Did you go out?’ Rosie asked. She wanted to shake him. It was like speaking to a surly child.

He shook his head. ‘But if they make out I’m tied up in this case I’ll lose any chance I ever had of access.’

‘That’s ridiculous. The kids have nothing to do with this.’

Then she wondered if she’d been too hard on him. Frank doted on his children. Before Lisa started being awkward they’d come to stay at weekends. Rosie tried to understand what it must be like for him, how lonely he must feel. Perhaps that was why he was good at his job. He made an effort with the staff and the customers because without them he’d have no one to speak to. He ever talked about friends or other family.

‘Why did you say that about the bloke that came in here looking for Mel? I mean, how did you know he didn’t do it?’

‘He wasn’t the type.’

‘Come on, Frank. What is the type? You must listen to the news. Anyone can commit murder. Teachers, doctors, anyone. And if they find him, you’ll get the police off your back, won’t you? There won’t be anything to get in the way of the access application then.’

He put his empty plate on the floor. ‘You’re a good lass, Rosie. I’ll miss you when you go to college.’

Oh God, she thought. A revelation. He wants to get inside my knickers.

‘I’ve got a lot to lose,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘This place. It’s all I’ve got.’

‘So?’

‘So people could make things awkward. With the brewery or the authorities.’

‘Has someone been threatening you?’

He looked at her with those eyes again.

‘For Christ’s sake, Frank. Go to the police. Get it sorted.’

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘They always catch murderers, don’t they? No need for us to get involved.’

‘Yes, Frank, there is.’

But he hardly seemed to be listening. By now she knew exactly what was going on. Joe might not go for her heavy-bosomed, hippy look, but it appealed to middle-aged men. She fended off the flattery and the clumsy approaches every day at work. She’d always suspected that Frank fancied her. Now she was certain. She pulled her chair closer to his.