The Sleeping and the Dead

There was one room which served as living- and dining-room. They sat at a round mahogany table and drank tea from translucent china cups, ate crumpets which Michael squatted by the fire to toast, and the cake Sylvie had baked. They talked about Stephen’s lecture on the Psalms. At one point Michael reached out and touched Sylvie’s hand.

‘Why don’t you go too?’ he said. ‘You know you’d enjoy it and I’ll be perfectly fine here on my own.’

‘I’m sure you would be.’ Her voice was serene. ‘But Stephen and I have had a lifetime together and I’ll have your company for such a short while. I’d prefer to stay and make the most of it.’

Then she asked him the question about his having been abroad.

Hannah had always been an observer. Even in her youth she could usually work out what was going on between people. But the situation in the Brices’ home confused her. She couldn’t make out at all where Michael fitted in.

After tea the Brices refused the offer of help with the washing-up and Michael took Hannah to his bedroom to find her his notes. She was tidier than most of her friends but his room was almost Spartan in its lack of clutter. She wondered if he had planned to invite her back and had cleared it specially, but she went there on subsequent occasions and it was always the same. It reminded her of a cell.

‘Are they your grandparents?’ she asked.

‘No, we’re no relation. They’re just friends.’

‘Friends of your father’s?’

‘Yes,’ he said, seeming grateful for an explanation that worked. ‘That’s right.’

It was a small room but there was a big desk under the window, of the kind that you’d have found in offices everywhere. It had three drawers on each side of the knee-hole. It wasn’t well made. The varnish was scratched and the top was chipped. Michael seemed flustered when he couldn’t find the notes where he’d expected them to be, with others in the top drawer.

‘Sorry, I thought I’d brought everything with me. But obviously not.’

‘Couldn’t they be somewhere else?’ Hannah yanked open a bottom drawer which was wider than the others. When it came to school work she was competitive. She wanted the notes, a chance to shine in the essay. She hadn’t come along just for the chance to know Michael better. She had expected to find more files in the drawer, neatly labelled, but it was empty apart from a shoebox, the sort she had collected when she was young for use in Blue Peter projects. He must have had the box for a long time. It was too small to hold shoes of the size he wore then.

Michael slammed the drawer shut with a ferocity which almost trapped her hand.

‘There’s nothing in there. I told you, I must have left them behind.’

‘Sorry.’ She looked at him, expecting an explanation. He said nothing.

The incident seemed to have thrown him. Hannah thought he was angry about the invasion of his privacy and apologized more profusely. It was something she could understand. He hardly seemed to hear what she was saying and when she said that her mother would be expecting her he seemed relieved to see her go. When Hannah saw him at school the next day he greeted her as if nothing had happened.

For several weeks she was haunted by the mystery of the small, blue shoebox. She imagined it contained answers to her questions about Michael.

Just before Christmas she was invited back to the Brices for mince pies and mulled wine. She made an excuse to go upstairs, slipped into Michael’s room and opened the drawer. She hated herself for doing it. Her hands were sweating as she tried to turn the knob. She had kept the door open so she would hear if anyone was coming. But it was an anticlimax. The drawer was empty. When she returned to the others Michael looked at her as he had on his first morning in the common-room, as if he knew exactly what she’d been up to.

Chapter Twelve

Throughout the interview both Porteous and Stout went on about Michael having been Hannah’s special friend, as if they had been lovers from the start. But they were never lovers, not in the sense the detectives meant, and they didn’t even start going out with each other until after the lower-sixth exams. She tried to explain that to them. The detectives listened but she wasn’t sure they understood.

The town itself had nothing to attract young people. The cinema had shut and the pubs were gloomy and unfriendly. In the summer at least, they were drawn to the lake. A couple of years before, the valley had been flooded to provide water for northern industrial towns and the biggest man-made lake in Europe was created. It was news at the time. Although it was surrounded by forestry plantations and was miles from everywhere, the novelty of the development and the scale and spectacle of it attracted tourists. An enterprising farmer opened a caravan site, then built a bar and a club, so it was more like a small holiday camp. It hardly provided a sophisticated night life but it was livelier than anything else the town had to offer and it drew the kids like a magnet.