“Dad?”
“Hello?”
“Is that you?”
“I’m trying to be a bit quiet, lad, Eileen’s just dropped off.”
“Bloody hell, Dad, is this true or what?”
“It’s true.”
“Only Leah saw it on the news and said there was a name she thought she recognised and then when I went in … Jesus Christ. What’s it all about?”
“I don’t know, Keith, I just don’t know. All I know is what it’s been like here. She saw it on the telly as well, you see, and she said, wasn’t that funny, someone with the same name, same age …”
“But it’s the same bloody town. It’s got to be her.”
“Yes, it is. It has got to be. Course. Only it was the shock.”
“So Eileen didn’t know anything?”
“Of course she didn’t know, how could she have known, what do you think?”
“Sorry, Dad, I meant, hadn’t she heard from Edwina or … well, I dunno, the police or something?”
“Edwina … Weeny … she doesn’t have anything to do with us, you know she doesn’t. Not since we got married. Not her, not Janet, though Weeny sends a card at Christmas. I always thought I ought to do something, you know, go and see her, see them both, put things right. I don’t want Eileen suffering because of me, losing her family because of me, only now …”
“Too bloody right, only now. Listen, I’m driving down tomorrow to fetch you. You won’t want to be waiting around there and you definitely won’t want to be going back on the coach. I’ll be there around dinner time.”
“No, no—”
“Dougie?”
“Hang on … Keith, she’s waking up … I’ll talk to you later. Thanks, boy, thank you.”
“Dougie?’’
“It’s all right, love, that was only Keith.”
Eileen sat up, flushed in the face. “What for? Is he all right, is it the children? What did he want?” She stared around her.
“He said he’d drive down tomorrow, take us back.”
She swung her legs slowly off the bed and then stood up gingerly as if unsure she could bear her own weight.
“Why would he do that?”
“He said you … we might not want to go back on the coach. With everyone.”
“I don’t see.’’
Dougie sighed. He did not know which way to turn, what to say or do that was not hopelessly wrong.
“It’s just a mistake that’s got to be sorted out, Dougie. I’ll sort it out. Do you think I should ring them now?”
“Ring who, Eileen?”
“The police … the television. No, it won’t be them.”
“You could maybe ring tomorrow. When we get home.”
“It wants sorting now, though. If it was one of your boys wouldn’t you want to get to the bottom of it straight away?”
“Only, the thing is, it was her name, her … where she lives … you said—”
“Oh, I know it was her, I know it was our Weeny, not someone else, I know that now, well, of course I do, there wouldn’t be two women with that name, same age, living in the same place, it’s not like Ann Smith, is it?”
“No.”
“No, I mean, well, it wants sorting because of course she couldn’t have done anything like that, how could she? Well, to start with, it’s men, that’s what men do, it’s always men.”
Rose West, Dougie thought. Myra Hindley.
“It’s a terrible thing to make a mistake over, terrible. I have to go up there, Dougie.”
She stood looking out at the dark sea, and the fairy lights strung round the promenade. The road was quiet. In the end he went and stood beside her. After a minute, he put his arm round her.
“I’ll ring Keith then,” he said.
“Yes. I think if he could fetch us, I’d feel better, it’d get us home quicker. I can start sorting it all out then.”
“I’ll ring now.”
“What do you want to do about eating, Dougie?”
Eating. He did not know. The word did not have a meaning.
“They don’t know anything, do they? Here. It’s a mistake, but all the same, I’d rather it was like this, that they don’t know. Meelup hasn’t got anything to do with Sleightholme, has it?”
He felt tears prick, hot at the back of his eyes.
“Maybe we could just walk a bit.”
“Yes,” Dougie said. “If that’s what you’d like.”
“I don’t know what I’d like,” Eileen Meelup said, turning back to the dark sea.
Going out of the hotel and away from the golden lights and warm voices into the street they instinctively reached for one another. They walked vaguely, not speaking, slowly up the promenade. There were a few people about with dogs, or just strolling, going into one of the pubs. The air smelled of seaweed and burned sugar from a candyfloss stall. At the top of the promenade, where the road began to slope away from the seafront, there was a small garden with gravel paths winding between shrubs. Eileen stopped beside a bench.
He did not suggest they sit, or walk on, he simply waited. He had no real sense of where he was or why and knew that it was the same with her. There was no room in their heads for anything but what she had heard and seen on the television screen and which, ever since, Dougie had tried to picture and hear for himself. It was impossible to understand. He wanted to be sure, as Eileen was sure, that it was a confusion and a mistake, a wrongful arrest, a muddle. What else was there to believe that was not the stuff of horror? He barely knew either of the girls and only felt unhappy that they had treated their mother thoughtlessly. She had been hurt and upset. He had been hurt and angry. But that was families. They’d come round. He had said it over and over. He had felt confident. Now he was treading water and any minute he would drown.
He felt Eileen’s hand clutching at his arm as if she, too, were drowning and he was her last support.
It was some time before they went back to the hotel. They wandered around the town, staring into the lighted windows of closed shops, at shoes and jars of sweets and swimming costumes and necklaces on decapitated velvet necks. And each window they looked into reflected their own faces back and the faces were stark and grave and quite unfamiliar.
In the end, by some sort of silent signal between them, they turned and went back to the hotel and the buzz of gossip, the smell of smoke from the bar. In the doorway, Eileen hesitated.
“Be a good idea,” Dougie said. “Maybe a brandy? I’ll have a whisky. Be settling.”
A roar of laughter burst up from a group, and the laughter came rolling towards them and broke over their heads like a wave. Someone turned round and caught sight of them hesitating in the doorway. The woman glanced away.
It was enough. There was no question, after all, of going into the bar, of having a drink among the others, as if they were normal people and like them, as if none of it had happened, the television had not spoken, the day would rewind itself and begin again.
Neither of them slept.