Chapter 50: Jacqueline Howarth, Mary & Peter Schormann

Manchester: Tuesday, October 7th

‘I’ve made a list of places where Vicky could be, from all the info I’ve got from the other stations.’ Jackie helped Mary to take her coat off and hung it on the coat-stand before taking Peter’s off him and doing the same. ‘Sit down and get your breath back while I make a coffee.’

Mary raised her voice above the music on the turntable of the record-player.

‘We’re grateful for this, Jacqueline. Aren’t we, Peter?’

He nodded.

She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘You okay?’

He touched her fingers and nodded again, leaning back on the orange Ercol settee.

‘The lift’s out of order.’ Mary watched Peter, anxious. ‘It’s taken us ages to climb all those stairs.’

‘Again?’ Jackie called from the kitchen. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know – I haven’t been out today. I’d have said we should meet somewhere else if I’d known.’

‘It’s all right, we took our time.’ Mary looked around the flat. She thought the orange shag-pile carpet and orange curtains clashed with the purple-painted walls.

She caught Peter’s eye.

‘Very – er – modern,’ he muttered.

‘Shush, she’ll hear.’ Mary walked over to the window. The restless impatience she’d felt since they arrived threatened to boil over. She suppressed the urge to rush Jacqueline, to grab the list and leave. There was no point; from what she’d seen so far, Manchester had changed almost beyond recognition from when she was last here. She and Peter wouldn’t have a clue where to start. ‘Nicki not home?’

‘Working. She said she’ll catch up later.’

‘You two all right?’ Mary asked.

From four floors up the view of Manchester stretched for miles. She let her eyes wander across the view. Streets crisscrossed like rows of dominos, tower blocks of flats stood alongside terraced houses and church spires. In the distance she could just make out a canal. Movement on the skyline caught her attention; a tiny train crossing a viaduct, etched against the pale grey October sky. She moved closer to the window and looked down. Streams of people were going in and out of the brightly-lit stores or moving in jumbled lines along the pavements, lines of cars and double-decker buses edged along the crowded streets. It seems strange that with this going on there is nothing to hear, she thought, except the low drone of the wind. She was startled by a pigeon alighting on the ledge outside and taking off again just as suddenly.

She swung around, anxious to talk, when Jackie came back into the room with a tray that she put onto a small kidney-shaped coffee table.

‘We’re great,’ her niece said. ‘Couldn’t be better.’ She smiled at Mary. ‘Where’s Richard, by the way?’

‘We dropped him off to catch a bus into Manchester. He was meeting someone… some friend.’ Mary glanced at Peter and then at Jackie. Linda had told her she’d passed on the message that he didn’t yet know about Karen. And the girl wasn’t in the flat. But there was always the danger Jackie would say something about the situation.

She needn’t have worried. Jackie reached towards the record cabinet and flicked a switch so the arm came off the record. ‘Neither of you have sugar. I’m right aren’t I?’ Without waiting for an answer she closed the drop-down front and picked up two cups and saucers and handed them over. ‘It’s hot,’ she warned.

‘The list?’ Mary sat next to Peter.

‘Oh, yes.’ Jackie opened a drawer in a low sideboard by the kitchen door and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. She knelt on the rug by them and held it out. ‘There’s eight possibles where Vicky could be. There are more but—’

‘But?’ Mary took the list from Jackie and scanned it.

‘Well…’ Jackie pulled a face. ‘From what you said about the note you found, I don’t think she’ll be in any of those. It sounds to me as though she’s gone to one of the hippie groups, if anywhere—’

‘Why? How would she have met any hippies?’

‘College? She could have met someone there. What are her friends like? Has she met any new friends?’ Without being conscious of it, Jackie moved into questioning mode. ‘Has she been talking about anyone new? Anything she didn’t talk about before? For instance, how political is she?’

‘Political?’ Mary gazed at Jackie then at Peter. ‘She’s not, not as far as we know.’ Mary stopped; how much did they know about Victoria these days?

‘I think there is a lot we don’t know about our daughter.’ Peter’s voice was soft. Mary felt his hand on her knee. ‘She does not talk with us, these days.’

‘We should have made her talk,’ Mary said. ‘We should have shown more interest in what she did at college.’ She met Peter’s gaze. ‘Have we neglected her? Concentrated on Richard so much that she felt left out.’

‘That’s rubbish, Auntie Mary, and you know it. From what I’ve always seen, you’ve always treated them equally—’

‘I don’t know.’ Mary felt overwhelmed. She fumbled for her handkerchief from her cardigan sleeve.

‘Well, I do,’ Jackie said, taking the paper back and pointing to the first three addresses. ‘These are all empty properties, or should be. There’s been a rise in squatters taking some of them over in Manchester—’

‘Why should she want to go somewhere like that?’ Mary was bewildered. ‘Why leave home to go with people she doesn’t know—’

‘We don’t know who she knows, Leibling.’

‘But going into a squat? I’ve read in the newspapers about what happens in places like that—’

‘I’m not saying she has, Auntie Mary, but there’s something called the Family Squatting Movement. They get people to take over empty places and use them to house homeless families from the Council Housing Waiting List. That’s why I asked if Victoria had got involved in politics … if she felt strongly about social injustice.’

‘Like I said, not that we know.’ Which actually meant nothing, Mary realised, because, when she thought about it, the only interaction between her and their daughter over the last few months had been rows and arguments.

‘Okay,’ Jackie said. She pointed to the first two on the list. ‘Let’s just try these first. I’ve put them in a kind of order. We might as well start there as anywhere.’

‘You’ll come with us, then?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ve got a couple of days leave coming to me. You didn’t think I’d let you do this all on your own, did you?’

‘Thanks, Jacqueline.’ Mary sniffed, blew her nose and sat straighter. Now there was prospect of doing something, the relief and hope inside her was the first she’d felt in a month.