The Sleeping and the Dead

His attitude to them was delightful. He was thoughtful and playful. He called them Sylvie and Steve. But as they sat in front of the fire in the tiny drawing-room, eating seed cake and crumpets, the thread of the conversation had led Hannah to think that they knew little more about his past than she did. It seemed that Stephen had been invited to a theological college in Idaho to give a lecture on the Psalms. They had been discussing flight plans, when Sylvia asked suddenly, ‘Have you ever been abroad, Michael? I can’t remember your saying.’

It was as if they had depended on what he told them for their knowledge of him. Hannah struggled to explain that to the detectives. ‘I don’t think they were relatives. They probably didn’t think there was anything sinister in his disappearance. They’d be sorry he hadn’t kept in touch, but they wouldn’t see it as their affair to meddle.’

‘What was he doing with them then?’ Stout demanded. ‘You wouldn’t just invite a strange teenager into your house.’

‘I think they were the sort of people who might.’ She paused. ‘They called him their gift from God.’

She’d always thought it was a strange thing to say. Michael had spoken of it in a slightly shamefaced way. ‘Look, Steve, that’s a big thing to live up to, you know?’ But the detectives remained impassive and unsurprised. She continued talking, trying to give an explanation they would accept as reasonable. ‘He arrived with them out of the blue, then disappeared in the same way. Perhaps that’s why they never reported him missing. They felt they had no claim on him.’

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Stout said. ‘That’s all very well, but they must have met up with him somewhere. He wouldn’t just have knocked on the door.’

‘Perhaps it was arranged through a charity,’ Porteous suggested. He looked at Hannah hopefully. ‘Was anything like that mentioned, Mrs Morton? Can you remember the name of any organization which might have put Michael in touch with the Brices?’

She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me,’ she said. ‘He liked being a mystery.’

‘All the same he must have said something. When you asked about his family, his previous school, he must have given some scrap of information.’

Despite her resistance, memories were already clicking into her brain, jerky images like an old home movie.

‘He told me a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Not all of them were true.’

‘But..?’ Porteous prompted.

‘But I really think his mother died when he was little. He was quite specific about that. She died of leukaemia and he could remember the funeral. Nobody had explained to him properly what was going on. He couldn’t understand where his mother was. When a black car turned up at the house, he thought it was to take him to see her.’ Hannah stopped, then continued hesitantly, ‘It was early spring. There were crocuses on the lawn. I don’t know if that’s any help.’ She thought: Unless that was one of his fictions too.

Porteous said, ‘At present everything is helpful.’

‘There is something else.’ She paused. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she had a sense too that she was betraying Michael. But it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to give the detectives something to get them off her back. ‘He resat the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of us.’ Again she saw she was telling the men something they already knew and wondered what other secrets they were keeping to themselves. ‘He made up a tale about his having been ill, but it was quite similar to his story of his mother’s illness. I was taken in by it at the time. Why wouldn’t I be? But now I work as a prison librarian and it’s occurred to me that there might be another explanation for his missing year. I wondered if he might have been in trouble. Youth custody. Borstal, I suppose it would have been then. That would be something he wouldn’t want to admit to the Brices or to me. That wouldn’t fit into the Michael Grey myth.’

She realized she sounded bitter and to hide her confusion poured herself another cup of coffee, though by now it was cold. Porteous jotted a few lines in his notebook but gave no other indication of what he thought of the theory.

‘Was he the sort of lad who might have been away?’ Stout asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You work in the nick, Mrs Morton. There aren’t many well-read, nicely spoken blokes in there.’

‘More than you’d realize.’ She thought of Marty, whose consideration had led to her being there.

‘But you know what I mean,’ Stout persisted. ‘Most of the men will have been brought up with some degree of physical and emotional deprivation.’

It seemed an odd thing for a policeman to say. She took his point more seriously.

‘Michael was a brilliant actor. And he was quick and bright. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Do I think he was brought up in the west end of Newcastle or on a council estate in Wallsend? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be astonished if that turned out to be the case.’

‘Where was he brought up then?’