Andy’s parents were in their fifties, which Izzy accepted wasn’t that old really, and yet they had an attitude to life that seemed to hark back decades. They were nice enough, unfailingly hospitable, but Izzy could always sense an underlying discomfort that sat there simmering. Philip, Andy’s father, dealt with it as fuel for inappropriate jokes, but his wife Fiona had no such outlet. There was a host of issues locked up in her diminutive frame, and Izzy could sense she wasn’t coping.
‘Dinner’s on the table,’ Fiona announced. ‘Come and get it before it goes cold.’
Izzy felt the tension even in this apparently innocent prompt. A real worry there that a few seconds’ delay in taking their seats could jeopardise the whole meal.
They filed through to the dining room, where a feast had been laid out on the table. Izzy and Philip sat on one side, Fiona and Andy on the other. Izzy always felt a bit awkward at this point in the proceedings, as though there might be an invitation to say grace. She wished for some music – anything to compensate for the embarrassing absence of conversation while they shuffled in their chairs and unfolded napkins across their laps.
She glanced at the immense plate of meat in the centre of the table. As she’d feared, it was roast beef, carved too thickly, the slices looking desiccated enough to suck the moisture from the air.
‘Wine?’118
Philip was looking directly at her, holding aloft a bottle of red. Izzy didn’t care what it was as long as it contained alcohol, and she brought her glass up to catch a stream of the oxblood liquid.
‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest.’
Izzy couldn’t quite tell whether this was a dig at her sexuality, so she let it go and quaffed the booze instead.
‘Don’t stand on ceremony,’ Fiona said. ‘Help yourself. You look starving.’
Izzy didn’t know what it was about herself that gave the impression she didn’t eat enough. Fiona was always telling her she needed fattening up, as though they planned on serving her as a roast dish one day. Or perhaps they were hoping she would become so obese that their daughter would lose all interest in her.
She forked a slice of the arid meat onto her plate; then, catching the critical eye of Fiona, reluctantly took another. She tossed on a few roast potatoes that landed with an impact capable of cracking her plate, then spooned on some vegetable mush that looked and smelled as though it had been boiling overnight but would at least be soft enough to force down her gullet.
Unwilling to tackle this tour de force of culinary ineptitude without the aid of additional moisture, she scanned the table and spied only a single gravy boat. She nabbed it quickly and poured half of its gelatinous contents all over her meal, deciding that the others would have to fight over the rest or make some more, because her piece of cow alone was going to drink all of this and still be thirsty, and who decided it should be called a gravy boat anyway? Were there any other foodstuffs that were served in boats?
She waited while everyone else plated up, and noticed that Fiona took only one slice of meat, two tiny potatoes and a thimbleful of the vegetable concoction.
‘Is that all you’re having, Fiona?’ she enquired politely.119
Fiona fluttered a hand over her solar plexus. ‘Little and often for me, because of my acid reflux. I shouldn’t really be eating roast potatoes, because of the grease, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to cut out every little thing that’s slightly fatty or spicy. I mean, you’ve got to live, haven’t you?’
Izzy nodded and looked across at Andy, who rolled her eyes.
‘So,’ Philip said, ‘what have you two been up to today?’
He asked it as though they were two kids who’d been allowed to play out without adult supervision. Izzy was tempted to tell them exactly what they’d done before getting out of bed this morning, see how that dampened appetites.
‘Nothing exciting. Andy and I did some—’
‘Andrea,’ Fiona corrected her.
And now Izzy really did want to give a blow-by-blow account of their earlier exertions, because for God’s sake, did the contraction of Andrea’s name seriously make her any less their daughter?
‘Andrea, yes. We did some cleaning and tidying. A bit of shopping. That kind of thing.’
‘I suppose you were out clubbing last night?’ Philip said. ‘That’s how Fiona and I met, in a nightclub, all those years ago.’
Izzy had heard the story before. It tended to lead to reminiscences about the exploits of Philip and his mates in their attempts to attract members of the opposite sex, the key word being ‘opposite’.
‘Yeah,’ she answered, ‘that’s how we met too. A bit of a quiet one last night, though. Just the two of us, snuggled up in front of the telly.’
She saw the nods and smiles, but also felt the unease in Andy’s parents, who then immediately changed the subject.
‘Andrea,’ Philip said. ‘How’s the job going? Any gruesome tales to tell us?’
‘Philip, please,’ Fiona said. ‘Not at the table. Andrea, the sanitised version, please.’120
Izzy zoned out then, allowing Andy to do all the talking. Her mind returned to the thoughts that had been occupying it ever since the previous morning when she met Kenneth for coffee.
She was now firmly convinced that Kenneth was responsible for the abduction of both Rosie Agutter and Heather Cunliffe. She was also convinced that they were both dead.
That knowledge was a heavy burden, but what made it worse was that she couldn’t share the load. She had thought dozens of times about calling Josh Frendy on his mobile – had even gone so far as to find his name in her phone contacts before changing her mind – but what would it achieve? She had no proof, no evidence. The only thing she could take to Josh was exactly what she had offered him before: her intuitive feeling that Kenneth was the guilty party. No amount of card tricks would persuade Josh to act on that basis alone.
She would need more. Something tangible. Hard, incontrovertible, damning proof.
Great, she thought. And how the hell am I going to get hold of that?
She recalled Kenneth’s face as he left the coffee shop. His voice.
Take care of yourself, Izzy.
To anyone else it might have seemed innocuous, but she had felt the menace there, the warning to stay out of his affairs.
Which meant he suspected that she’d been trying to trip him up.
She cast her mind back to her school days, to Kenneth as he was then. Strange, yes. And as private as a clam. But a would-be killer? What had happened to him in these past five years? He had managed to attract a wife, albeit one who might have been willing to jump on a plane for the first Westerner prepared to fund the air fare. Had she not been enough to satisfy his urges? Or had she somehow had the opposite effect?121
Whatever; he was dangerous now, a killer of young women, and Izzy didn’t fancy bumping into him in a dark alleyway. So how could she possibly investigate him while keeping him at a substantial distance?
She hadn’t told Andy about any of this, not even about seeing Kenneth yesterday. Andy had thought it weird enough that she’d gone for coffee with a policeman; what would she think about her doing the same with a serial killer?
Serial killer? Really? Kenneth Plumley?
She didn’t know what the formal definition of a serial killer was – there was probably some threshold on victim numbers that you had to pass to be considered eligible for membership of that particular elite – but in her book, anything more than one counted as serial. Which made her wonder just how many girls Kenneth had actually taken. Could they be counted on the finger of one hand? Double digits?
And when had he first taken an interest in this particular pursuit? Was he doing it when she knew him at school? While she was talking to him about the books she was reading, was he already plotting his next abduction?
There were limits to Izzy’s powers, even with people she knew well. She couldn’t just look at someone and divine their every secret thought or misdeed. And yet she was convinced that if Kenneth had harboured such dark desires back then, she would have picked up on something. She would have known that he was someone to be avoided.
Which brought her back to her earlier question. What had gone wrong in Kenneth’s life in the five years since she had last seen him?
Izzy suddenly realised that all conversation at the table had stopped and that everyone was staring at her in expectation.
‘What?’122
It was Andy who answered. ‘Mum wants to know if you think you’ll ever go back to university to finish your degree.’
It was a typical question from Fiona. Its subtext was, Look, Andrea, this girl clearly has no future prospects and you need to push her to one side and get on with life, preferably in the company of a red-blooded heterosexual male. Izzy knew this even though she hadn’t heard it directly, because in her experience most of Fiona’s probing was laced with such discouragement.
Izzy furnished them with a suitably vague response and then returned to the arduous task of clearing her plate while struggling not to become lost in her own thoughts again. She forced herself to toss in the occasional contribution when it seemed appropriate, but she could sense that Andy was growing increasingly annoyed with her. She wasn’t surprised when, at the end of the meal, Andy insisted that she and Izzy would do the washing-up.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Andy said to her when they were alone in the kitchen.
Izzy shrugged. ‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Why? Because nobody can get a word out of you, that’s why. I know my parents don’t make scintillating conversation, but at least they’re trying. Couldn’t you make a bit more of an effort?’
‘Sorry. I’m not with it today.’
‘Not just today. You were like this yesterday too. Have I done something to upset you?’
‘No, not at all. It’s just …’
‘What?’
‘The Kenneth Plumley thing. It’s still bothering me.’
‘Who’s Kenneth Plumley?’
‘The caretaker at my old school. The one who—’
‘Oh, him! I thought that was old news now.’
‘It is, but …’
‘You’re doing it again, aren’t you?’123
‘Doing what?’
‘Obsessing about what’s going on in other people’s heads. You told the police about Plumley, then investigated, and it turned out there was nothing to it. You need to let it go now.’
‘I know, but it’s not as simple as that.’
‘Why? Why isn’t it?’
Izzy looked her partner in the eye and wondered what to answer. Tell her that she followed Kenneth to his house? That she eavesdropped on him from his own garden? That she then tracked him down at the hardware store, virtually manhandled him into a coffee shop and proceeded to extract an unspoken confession from him? Yeah, that would really contradict the view of Andy’s parents that there were better catches to be had.
Besides, what would be the point? She had already reached the conclusion that the police wouldn’t believe what she could tell them now, and that she had no practical way of taking it any further on her own. She was up against a brick wall.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s not my problem. Come on, let’s finish these dishes so I can go and tell your mum and dad that we’re thinking of going to Lesbos next year.’