The Sleeping and the Dead

‘West Yorkshire. At least that’s where he said he went to school.’ Hannah waited for another question: And before that? But it never came. Besides, she had told them the truth. On Michael’s first day a girl from the upper sixth had asked which school he’d come from and he’d answered, without pausing a moment, giving her a smile: ‘A place in West Yorkshire. You won’t have heard of it.’

When Hannah told Porteous that, he wrote it down and said seriously to Stout, ‘It seems a strange thing to make up, that, off the cuff. Check out approved schools, borstals and detention centres for that period in Yorkshire. Or perhaps that’s where his family lived. We might find his mother’s records.’

I don’t think you will, Hannah thought, and wondered why she didn’t speak the words out loud. Porteous turned to her with his diffident smile, which wasn’t very different from one of the expressions in Michael’s repertoire. ‘Is there anything else you remember from that first meeting, Mrs Morton?’

She didn’t answer. She thought she’d given him enough.

‘You don’t know how much this is helping us. We’re very fortunate to have found a reliable witness at this early stage. What about his voice? Could you believe that he came from Yorkshire?’

‘It depended to whom he was talking.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was a habit. I explained he was an actor but I don’t think this was self-conscious. He didn’t realize he was changing his voice to suit the occasion. But he was. When he was speaking to us he spoke as we did. With the Brices it was old-fashioned English. We had a biology teacher from Edinburgh. She thought he came from there too because when he spoke to her he had something of the accent. It wasn’t imitation or that he was trying to impress. He was a sort of verbal chameleon.’

Hannah sipped cold coffee. She thought she had nothing left to tell them. Surely now they would let her go. But Porteous shifted uncomfortably in his very comfortable chair.

‘Tell us about you relationship with Mr Grey,’ he said gently. He was more like a counsellor than a police officer. ‘In some detail if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Morton. If you could cast your mind back.’

‘We were friends,’ Hannah said.

‘More than friends surely.’

‘Not at first.’

The men waited for her to say more.

‘What are these questions about?’ She’d had enough. ‘You know who he is. Sally told me you found the dental records. There must be more efficient ways of finding what you want than listening to my ram-blings.’

Porteous gave another little apologetic smile. ‘Unfortunately not. Apart from your ramblings we’ve very little. We know that the body in the lake was that of a young man known as Michael Grey. One day he had toothache and Mrs Brice took him to her dentist. We’re lucky that the practice kept records, but it hasn’t provided us with a conclusive identification. It hasn’t helped us to trace the victim’s family. Because no birth certificate was issued to Michael Grey on the date he gave as his date of birth. There are no medical records or child-benefit records for him. There is no record of his having existed before he started school with you.’

They looked at her. It had been a long time since anyone had given her their full attention. She found it flattering. No doubt it was a technique they often used. She was taken in by it. She dragged her memory back almost thirty years.

Chapter Eleven

Her father died the summer Michael arrived. He committed suicide. He rigged up a hose-pipe from the exhaust of their Austin and the fumes killed him. Hannah didn’t find him. He had timed it so her mother would do that when she went into the garage to fetch potatoes to peel for their supper. Mr Meek had an allotment. He kept the potatoes in the garage in wooden trays in the dark to stop them sprouting.

Looking back, Hannah thought her father and mother had never got on. He was nervy, quick to snap. Any noise or disruption to his routine threw him. She thought perhaps she’d inherited her own intolerance of change from him. He was a chain smoker. Every evening he came home from work, threw down his briefcase and would sit for an hour, sucking on cigarette after cigarette, going through the imagined slights of the day. He felt he was much undervalued at the bank. No one appreciated the work he put in. The only time he was anything like content was in the allotment. Perhaps the physical activity helped him to relax. Perhaps in the mindless routine of digging and weeding he could forget his troubles.