Breakfast on the fly didn’t happen at Dunnington Road. As kids, she and Luke had come down every day to find the kitchen table laid, butter in a dish, the tea already brewing. In winter, Christine, messianic about hot food, had done them porridge or a boiled egg with buttered soldiers. Seeing the one she’d made for Lennie this morning caused Robin a stab of feeling, not all of whose strands she could identify. Guilt and frustration, obviously – yes, she should have made Len breakfast – but there was something painful, too: Lennie had Robin’s old egg cup, a stretch of china wall with Humpty’s two stripy legs dangling, the cup part formed by the top of his trousers.
Because of the late finish, Maggie had told her to come in at ten. ‘Great, so I’ll drop Len off,’ said Dennis. ‘You and your Mum can have a coffee before you go, Robin.’
She opened her mouth but was silenced by a look. For me.
Hard to know who was more uncomfortable. She assumed her mother would sit back down to finish her toast but after seeing Lennie and Dennis off, she chucked it in the bin and started clearing the table at warp speed, as if now her husband was gone, her own right to eat had expired. The milk was back in the fridge, jam in the cupboard, taps running before Robin could carry a pair of plates to the sink. ‘She makes me feel so lumbering,’ she remembered telling Rin. ‘Like some kind of … pachyderm.’
Christine washed and Robin dried, the draining board filling faster than she could clear it. On the windowsill was a vase of daffodils, new since yesterday. ‘Those are nice,’ she said to break the silence. ‘Bright.’
‘I thought we all needed something hopeful-looking.’
Robin turned, her hand reaching for the cupboard automatically, the order of the house so deeply ingrained in her that, even now, sixteen years later, she had a whole neural pathway for her parents’ toast rack.
Her mother carefully cleaned the egg cup, rinsed it then handed it to her.
‘Gran gave me this for Easter years ago. You had it all this time?’
‘You never said you wanted it, so …’
‘No, I mean, you kept it. You didn’t throw it away.’
‘I wouldn’t.’ Christine looked startled. ‘It’s yours.’
‘You don’t have to keep stuff if it’s cluttering up your house.’
Her mother gave her a strange look, as if she were being deliberately thick, then plunged a pan into the water. Puzzled, Robin turned and put Humpty back where he’d always lived, next to Luke’s egg cup, which was shaped like the bottom half of a chicken, a white cup supported by claw-like yellow feet. The strange, tender feeling still lingered, and to get rid of it, she thought of getting his cup out, asking Christine if it reminded her of Natalie. But then, she thought, even if it did, her mother wouldn’t be mean enough to say so. Unlike her.
Christine pulled the plug, rinsed the sponge and started cleaning the work surface in neat stripes.
She’s a human being, too. Will you try and remember that?
She should try and talk to her, shouldn’t she? That’s what people did with their mothers, shared what was on their minds.
Give her a chance.
‘Mum,’ she said, ‘I don’t think Len likes Savvy’s. Has she mentioned it to you?’
Christine tapped the toaster and swept the fallen crumbs into her cupped hand. ‘No. She’s more likely to talk to you, though, isn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. Normally, yes, but in this case, I’m worried she doesn’t want to make me feel bad.’ A swoop in her stomach at the leap of faith: usually she’d do anything to conceal vulnerability from her mother.
‘Well, it must be very hard for her, don’t you think? Going from that lovely school with playing fields and a swimming pool to an inner-city comp? It’s not much above a sink school, really, Savvy’s. That’s why we had to send Luke private, even though it meant a lot of sacrifices.’
Robin thought of Kev in the middle of his enormous scrapyard, king of every rusting heap he surveyed. ‘They do have successes, though, Savvy’s. Kevin Young …’
‘Kevin Young had a family business to go into.’
She took a deep breath. ‘That’s true. But he’s grown it – it’s huge now.’
Christine said nothing, her back turned as she straightened the salt and pepper grinders, scrubbed at a spot Robin couldn’t see.
In for a penny. ‘What would you do, if you were me?’
A pause, unremarkable unless you’d seen it a hundred times before. Her mother seemed to gather herself, as if she were drawing on a malign energy source, undergoing a transformation. When she turned, her eyes were hard. ‘I wouldn’t be in the situation in the first place,’ she said. ‘The job I can’t talk about but Adrian – we thought he was a nice man. The twice you let us meet him.’
‘Yes, I know. He is.’
‘What are you looking for, Robin? That’s what I don’t understand. Wasn’t he good enough for you?’
Why do you think you deserve better? What makes you so special?
‘He’s good-looking, he’s gentlemanly. And he loves Lennie, obviously.’
Robin thanked god she’d told no one bar Rin what he’d said about adoption. Christ, if her mother knew.
‘He’s got a good job, hasn’t he?’ said Christine. ‘Well paid?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘If you’d got married, he could have helped with the school fees. And you wouldn’t have had to move back here at all; you’d be living with him, wouldn’t you? Elena said he’s got a lovely house, a garden, and—’
Robin felt blood rush to her face. ‘What are you suggesting, Mum? Apart from that this is all my fault.’
‘I’m not suggesting it’s your fault, Robin. Who else’s fault could it be?’
For a moment, she didn’t trust herself to speak. Yes, of course it was her bloody fault. But again, when you were an actual agent in the world, that was how it worked: you made the decisions and you lived with them; good or bad, they were yours. Much easier to let someone else take responsibility. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you think I should have married Adrian to bankroll my life? To get a house and have him pay my child’s school fees?’
‘Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to make everything sound so … vile?’ her mother hissed. ‘He loves Lennie – don’t you think he might have liked to have done that for her, got pleasure from it? Don’t you think he might have enjoyed sharing his life with you both? But no, you don’t think like that, do you? It’s all you, you, you – what you can achieve, how you can do it all by yourself.’
‘So I should have sold myself, you’re saying? Done a deal? Let him pay for everything because he loves me. Isn’t that prostitution? Safely middle-class, socially acceptable prostitution.’
They stared at each other, Robin’s chest burning with feeling. So much she wanted to say, to ask: I’ve worked so hard, Mum, to provide for Lennie, to make a success of things. To prove to her that we – women – can. Even if you disapproved when I had her, isn’t that something? An achievement? Aren’t you proud of me at all?
Her mother huffed, a short jet of air from the nose, then turned her back.
‘Go to work, Robin. Please.’
Five minutes later on Wake Green Road, Robin stopped the car and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. Her head was pounding, the start of a monster headache. She took a couple of Anadin with a swig of stale-tasting water from a bottle in the door. Screwing the lid on, she saw pronounced veins in the backs of her hands. Maybe she’d have a stroke – that felt like a logical next development.
She had to get out of Dunnington Road, she couldn’t live like this. But how? She couldn’t take Dennis’s pension, even if it was a loan, even if, as she suspected, he’d laid a breadcrumb trail of little pensions all the way through his sixties. At her age, taking her dad’s money wasn’t much better than taking Adrian’s. But what other options did she have? Could she get a bank loan at this point? Perhaps if she asked Maggie to support an application, confirm that she was employed and …
She stopped suddenly. Corinna had offered to lend her money, too, hadn’t she? That hungover day in London, she’d offered to lend her the deposit on a place.
‘No, don’t get funny, I’d like to. I’ll even charge you interest if it would make you feel better.’
A month’s rent. Or a month and a half. How could she do that if she and Josh were broke?
Had she had money salted away? Rin, who’d grown up with very little, was careful. Saving was so second nature to her, she hadn’t thought that Robin wouldn’t do it. But no – when Josh had stopped paying himself, Kath said, they’d lived on Rin’s salary and her savings. Given how much he hated laying people off, they surely would have used those up first. Unless she had a secret account – but then, why would she?
How much had Rin earned? Since Peter was four or five, she’d been selling advertising space for a group that published local magazines. Her base pay was modest, she said; most of it was commission. She’d liked the challenge, claimed it kept things interesting. She’d never told Robin how much the commission came to but it couldn’t be a lot. They weren’t talking Vogue here – the magazines had names like Solihull Life and were distributed free around dentists’ offices and hotel lobbies. The advertisers were local restaurants, salons, florists. She’d be surprised if Rin had made thirty grand. Which sounded all right, liveable-on, but as the sole income for three people, the mortgage on the snowman house, two cars, childcare? Forget it.
What about the supposed loan against the machines? That would be just like Corinna, lending money from a loan she’d needed. If you were part of her gang, she’d give you her shoes even if she was standing on hot coals, too. But the loan had been Easter last year, ten months or so ago – how much had it been?
She did some rough calculations. Say Rin had earned thirty thousand. After tax and National Insurance, that would be somewhere around twenty, roughly, say twenty-two for the sake of argument. Less than two thousand pounds a month take-home, either way. Would that even cover their mortgage?
She’d got Ana’s number yesterday on the pretext of arranging a visit to Peter but she rang it now, doing more calculations while she waited. She didn’t know the going rate in Birmingham but in London she’d paid Naomi seven pounds an hour for after-school with Lennie. Naomi was sixteen so say ten an hour, for an adult. Two afternoons – three o’clock ’til seven, at a guess. Eight hours at ten pounds an hour – £320 a month. Even at eight pounds, it was £256, a significant chunk of two grand.
And then there was evening babysitting. They’d gone out to dinner at least once with Kath and Gareth, and Kev had seen them out on their own, too. Quite apart from the babysitting, there was the cost of the dinner itself. Given Kev’s set-up these days, Robin doubted the place had been a dive, either.
‘Hello?’ Ana’s voice sounded distrustful, reminding Robin of her wariness at the door.
‘Hi, it’s Robin,’ she said. ‘I haven’t spoken to Will yet but I’ll let you know as soon as I do, okay?’ She’d have to text him next. ‘I’ve just got a couple of other questions.’ Don’t ask if it’s okay; why give her the chance to say no? ‘You only worked for them two afternoons a week now, is that right? Two for them, three for another family. They’d cut your hours?’
‘Yes, from September, two afternoons. In the holidays a bit more. When no school.’
‘Did they pay you on time?’
‘Why you ask?’
‘I’ve heard that Josh’s business wasn’t doing so well – I wondered if they were struggling for money.’
‘They paid me on time,’ she said, defensive, as if Robin were throwing shade on their honour. ‘Always.’
‘How? I mean, did they transfer money to your account or …’
‘Cash,’ she said. ‘They paid me in cash. Okay?’
In the office, they sat on the table looking at the board. Maggie drained the last cold mouthful of her coffee.
‘I’m sorry,’ Robin said.
‘For what?’
‘Diving in too quickly, drawing attention before we could get more of a sense of the place. Or go upstairs.’
Maggie shrugged. ‘We got a couple of new things.’ She pointed the marker at The Spot, under which it now said Tarin?
‘One thing, technically.’
‘Well …’
‘Though,’ Robin said, ‘we also got confirmation of a kind, didn’t we?’
‘How so?’
‘Both times we started talking, we were referred to the manager, David, almost straight away. The barman did it and Lisa did last night. Also, she was watching us. As soon as we exchanged more than a few words with our waitress, she was over.’
‘Hm.’ Maggie was listening.
‘Policy, do you think? Everything through him? And is this since Becca disappeared or has it always been like it? Either way, what does that tell us? I mean, it’s just a bar, isn’t it, a club, not the bloody Foreign Office.’
‘Though you could be forgiven for thinking that,’ Maggie replied, dry. ‘The Italian, two Australians that we know of.’
‘Seriously, though, Maggie, why does this “ship” have to be so tight?’
‘Harry? It’s Robin.’
‘Hi.’ Trepidation – what was she going to tell him now?
‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘nothing alarming. I wanted to ask you about a woman called Tarin. She works at The Spot, we heard she and Becca were friends. Have you met her?’
‘Yeah, quite a few times. She’s cool, Becca likes her a lot. She’s Aussie, two or three years older than us. She’s over here travelling.’
‘You wouldn’t have her number?’
‘I don’t, sorry.’
‘Do you know her surname?’
‘No.’ A pause. ‘Why?’
‘Nothing specific, we’re just following up with anyone Becca might have talked to recently. Tarin’s away at the moment, taking a few days off, and obviously The Spot don’t give out staff numbers.’
‘Try Instagram – she’s got an account for her travelling pictures, she showed us one night. And actually, Becca showed me some of them too, independently.’
‘Do you know what her handle is?’
‘I don’t. But they followed each other, if that helps.’
‘Okay, great. Thanks. Harry – one other quick thing. You used to go and pick Becca up from The Spot, is that right? When she finished – quite late?’
‘Two o’clock, when they closed. Friday and Saturday, mostly. We’d have a drink then she’d come and stay at mine.’
‘So you picked her up so you could spend the night together? No other reason?’
‘Like what?’
‘You weren’t ever worried about her safety at The Spot?’
‘Why?’ His voice quickened. ‘Should I have been?’
‘Not as far as we know at this stage but we need to cover all the angles.’
‘I didn’t like her finishing so late,’ he said. ‘I liked picking her up because I didn’t feel great about her getting Ubers on her own. Even Ubers were a compromise – she wanted to get the night bus. God – was I worrying about how she got home and all the time, the danger was there?’
Punch-drunk as she’d been when she’d trawled Becca’s social media, Robin did now have vague memories of cross-referencing an Australian woman’s account somewhere. She found Becca’s page and went through the pictures one by one, scanning the comments for a likely-sounding username. A photo dated October showed Becca and Lucy at Sarehole Mill, Hall Green, according to the location stamp. Birthday outing to Middle Earth – love a Hobbit! Becca had written. @OzTarrynTravels – The place I was telling you about, Tolkien’s inspiration! Bingo.
Robin clicked on the tag. @OzTarryn’s circular profile picture showed a cold-looking but grinning woman with a surfboard on what looked like a beach in North Devon. Grey water, grey sky, leaden sand – Bondi, eat your heart out. Aussie girl taking time out from the 9 – 5 to see the world, said the bio line. Current location: Workshop of the World, UK, aka Land of the Ancestors.
‘Got her,’ she said to Maggie.
The first two rows of pictures, posted only an hour earlier, were location-stamped Edinburgh, and a couple would have been recognizable anyway: the castle on its crag, a view down the Royal Mile. One posted yesterday showed a slightly tatty-looking café with a jumble of wooden tables and wheelback chairs. Where it all began, Tarryn had written. The Elephant House! Birthplace of Harry Potter! Never met an exclamation mark they didn’t like, these girls. Robin ran her eyes down the comments hoping for some return fantasy-fiction fan-girling but alas, no @BeccaWoods95.
‘She’s not in any of these Edinburgh pictures, is she?’ asked Maggie, over her shoulder.
‘No. Would have been nice, wouldn’t it, to show Valerie Becca posing around among the bagpipes with her new bezzie mate?’
‘Can we get in touch with her on here? Tarryn?’
‘If I create an account. I’ll do it now.’
In the couple of minutes it took to do that and come back to the page, another picture had appeared, this one an iron cage over a grave in a moodily twilit churchyard. Last night at Greyfriars Kirk … Mortsafe – to keep out the body-snatchers!
Robin clicked to comment straight away – maybe she could catch her online. Hi, she wrote, I’m trying to get in touch with @BeccaWoods95 and heard that you’re friends. Really appreciate if you could DM or email me. Thanks. She gave the Hotmail address she kept for mailing lists and online shopping and opened that account in a new window.
While she waited, she went back to her deep dive on the syndicate of investors. After an agonizing process cross-referencing Facebook and the photograph from the Post, she had isolated the right Tom Harris from about a hundred others and identified him as the owner of a chain of seven local shoe shops: Droitwich, Shirley, Perry Barr, Redditch. He was forty-nine, went to Catholic school then university in Lancaster before moving back to Brum and opening the first shop. What had made him choose shoes, of all things? Like Iain Ferguson and Steve Perry yesterday, though, he seemed to be an upstanding member of society; three of the four little articles she found were to do with the twenty pairs of shoes he gave away in September each year to children whose parents would otherwise struggle to afford them.
The Dell’s fan laboured as she toggled back to Hotmail then Instagram. Nothing from Tarryn yet though there’d been no new pictures since the mortsafe, either.
Robin turned to Steve Baker’s page in her book with a sinking feeling. Steve Baker – for crying out loud. To torment herself, she typed the name into Facebook and scrolled through screen after screen after screen of hits. This time she didn’t even have a photograph. Without much hope, she Googled the name and the first line of the address she’d got from Companies House. To her frank astonishment, up came a link to a Facebook page dedicated to campaigning Birmingham City Council for a pedestrian crossing. Baker and his wife, Frances, were tagged in a photograph showing a petition with pages of signatures. From what Robin could tell, the son of a family friend, a teenager, had been hit by a car while crossing their road.
She clicked through to Baker’s own page. He was younger than the three who’d been pictured in the Post, not much older than her, probably – yes, born 1979 said his profile. KES then Durham for university, and now he was a property lawyer. She scrolled down through pictures of him, Frances and their two young daughters at Christmas and in Halloween costumes, on a beach holiday in Corsica. Below those was a large group photograph, a crowd of men in suits all looking up towards the camera, congregants before a pulpit. Class of ’97 reunion!
Robin stopped. Josh had gone to KES. He’d been three academic years ahead of her and Corinna, and they’d left Camp Hill in 2000. And he’d been to a reunion last summer; she remembered the story of the hangover.
She double-clicked on the photograph, enlarging it to fill most of the screen. Baker was in the second row and then – yes. There he was. Middle left, turning to talk to his neighbour just as the shot had been taken: Josh. Robin sat back in her chair.
They must have known each other. There were, what, seventy or eighty men in the photo? KES wasn’t enormous – if they’d been there together, in the same year, at the very least they’d have been aware of each other. Had they been friends? She hadn’t ever met him but Josh hadn’t met all their school friends, either. She didn’t remember him talking about a Steve Baker but, again, a name so unremarkable would go in one ear and out the other. Her first impulse was to text Corinna – she actually reached for her phone. When the shock subsided, she stood and carried the laptop round the table.
Maggie peered at the screen. ‘What am I looking at?’
‘Steve Baker, just here, he’s one of the syndicate, and then here …’ She pointed.
‘Is that … Josh?’
‘KES reunion, class of ’97. Taken last year.’
‘They knew each other?’
‘Not that I was aware of, but I wouldn’t have known all his school friends, necessarily, and maybe they’d reconnected since then, recently even. He’s stayed local, too, this guy. Maggie,’ Robin chose her words carefully, ‘the police think Josh had a mental breakdown because the factory was struggling.’
Maggie frowned. ‘Was it? Did you know that?’
‘No. Samir told me.’
‘Samir?’
‘He was at the hospital when I went to see Peter. Rin hadn’t said anything. I mean, two or three years ago, she mentioned there were some issues – fewer orders, slow payments – but I had no idea things were so rough.’ She paused. ‘There’s some suggestion Josh had another source of money.’
‘Samir told you that, too?’
‘Kath, Josh’s sister. He’d got a loan, she said, but he wouldn’t tell her where from.’
Maggie put her elbow on the table, tapped her fingers against her lips. ‘Had you ever heard them mention The Spot?’
Robin shook her head.
‘It’s probably just a coincidence. It’s not a big city when you move in certain circles. But check it out.’
She searched the Net for other links between Josh and Steve Baker, and then for any between Josh and the other investors. After twenty-five minutes she came up empty-handed. ‘Nothing online,’ she told Maggie. ‘I think I’m going to ring him.’
‘Okay. Gently does it, though.’
Baker’s law firm was on Colmore Row, five minutes away on the other side of the cathedral. She dialled the main number and waited for the receptionist to put her through.
‘Steven Baker, good morning.’ He sounded delighted to be a provincial property lawyer on this dull February day. ‘How can I help?’
Robin introduced herself. ‘I’m a private investigator,’ she said, ‘but I’m also a friend of Josh and Corinna Legge.’
‘Oh god,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’ve heard about what’s happened?’
‘Of course, yes. Dreadful – just …’ He tailed off, and she pictured him shaking his head.
‘Obviously time’s passing now,’ she said, ‘so I’m widening the circle and talking to anyone who might have known him. You were at KES together, is that right? Were you still in touch?’
‘No. I saw him last summer, June or the beginning of July, but that was a school reunion. We said hello – we were on the rugby team together back then and I always liked him, he was a good bloke, but we were never close. We were in different groups.’
‘Mr Baker, we’re following up every possible connection – I understand you have an investment in a bar in Hurst Street, The Spot?’
A momentary hesitation. ‘Yes. How did you hear about that?’
‘Did Josh have any connection to The Spot, that you know of?’
‘No. Certainly not a financial one, if that’s what you mean. I wouldn’t know if he’d ever been there, of course, but … What …? Hang on a moment, I’m confused. What’s the link to The Spot?’
Robin felt suddenly foolish. Yes, what was the connection, apart from her and her desperate need to make any kind of progress?
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean to imply there is one at all. As I said, at this stage, time being what it is, we’re just following up on any and every detail.’
‘Because if you are implying there’s anything criminal going on at The Spot,’ he said, all jollity gone, ‘I’d advise you to be very careful. It’s a reputable business, owned by a group of reputable people, run by a very capable manager. As I’m sure the police would be happy to confirm.’
At half past two, Maggie stood, cleared their sandwich packets off the table and tossed them into the bin. ‘Right, I’m kicking you out. Go and see your daughter. Give her my love.’
‘I’ll let you know if I hear from Tarryn,’ Robin said, putting her jacket on.
‘Yep. And I’ll keep you posted from this end. Otherwise, see you Monday.’
Across the street in the car park, Robin took a moment to think. It was earlier than she’d expected, school didn’t finish until three forty-five, so as long as she didn’t hang about, she had time for a detour. She opened Google Maps, worked out a route round the one-way system and fired up the engine.
Bishop Street was directly behind the wholesale markets, ten minutes’ walk, if that, from the Selfridges building with its spotted silver skin. They’d come this way, Digbeth, to see Harry but this time she turned off on the other side of the road, by a mean-looking building painted with a giant leprechaun and signs for Carling Black Label, its windows blinded with cardboard. A pile of boxes on the steps had been someone’s bed for the night.
After a few hundred yards, the road divided and since no one was behind her, she slowed down. The buildings here were classic small-scale industrial, two or three storeys of red brick, the better-looking ones Victorian, the modern ones built as basically as possible, plastered with garish signs. An engineering works and the printing company next door looked lively, as did a place selling sheet plastic, but next to a car-repair shop was an abandoned warehouse, its wooden despatch doors padlocked and peeling.
The pub on the next corner was boarded up, too. The buildings beyond it were low and ugly, whatever businesses they’d once housed long gone, sheets of chipboard rotting where the windows had been. Others had been knocked down to make litter-strewn parking spaces, not that there was any shortage of either. No wonder Josh had needed antidepressants – how had he managed so long without them?
She pulled in across the street from Legge’s and let the engine idle. As she knew now, these were the premises that the first brothers Legge had bought back in the 1880s, the sturdy Victorian two-storey remaining a constant as the generations photographed outside it elapsed. Every working day since Victorian times, a Legge had opened these doors, greeted the workforce, set about selling their springs. So much history, and then the older history of the city underneath. She knew from Dennis that this area had been the start of Birmingham, where first the markets, then the workshops had sprung up along the little river Rea that ran right underneath here somewhere, tarmacked over now, gone underground like some Brummie version of the Styx.
She’d been inside two or three times, years ago, before Peter was born. She and Rin had come to meet Josh for lunch one day; another time they’d got a ride back with him from town. He’d given her a tour, showing her the workshops on the ground floor where huge bits of machinery spun greasily, overseen by men who stuffed away copies of the Sun as they approached, and wooden crates of finished springs in copper and stainless steel waited to be packed for despatch. The offices were upstairs, a long room with six or seven old-fashioned desks, Josh and Gerry’s at one end, at the other the secretaries and the book-keeper who’d made a huge fuss of Lennie, she remembered now, feeding her pretty much a whole pack of Tesco mini-muffins.
She’d expected the factory to look shabby now, the failure inside reflected on the out, but they’d been keeping up appearances: it was the best-kept property by far on this stretch of the road. It was shuttered, of course, the grille down over the loading bay, all the blinds drawn, but the narrow strip of yard out front had been swept and the navy-blue paint on the door was glossy. Even the windows were clean.
The history, that sense of continuity, had surrounded Josh like warmth in the folds of his coat; it was one of the many things Corinna had loved about him. She’d spent her first decade moving from one place to another according to whether her dad was on the wagon and employed, or AWOL, last seen en route to the off-licence with Di’s purse. It wasn’t until she was twelve and Di finally gave up on Trevor that she’d lived anywhere for more than a year. Even after the divorce, their first landlord in King’s Heath had sold the flat out from under them. Josh’s family could trace their history on this patch for hundreds of years. They didn’t rent, they owned.
Would he ever walk into the factory again? One way or another, she doubted it now. After five days, it was getting harder and harder to believe he could come back physically unharmed from wherever he was. And even if he was still alive, there’d probably be criminal charges to face.
He’d done something, she was sure of it now. That sense of continuity, solid ground under his feet, had a flip-side: a stupid sense of responsibility, a compulsion to share his security with other people – Corinna, Peter, his workforce. He’d wanted to keep them safe. Robin felt a sudden burst of rage – she wanted to grab him, bodily shake him, You idiot, you idiot – what have you done?
A memory of the scream, shrill, heart-stopping, and she was back in that yard, the brick wall behind them, the alleyway disappearing in darkness. A half-ring of streetlight. His face. I don’t know. I don’t know.
The sound of an engine yanked her out of it. Heart beating fast, she saw a silver saloon coming down the road behind her. Two men in the front seats, visors down against the sun which already, at barely three o’clock, seemed to be making its excuses. Too late to move: it would only draw attention. She lowered her head, tried to meld with the seat.
They indicated and pulled in just in front of her. Robin kept her eyes down, avoiding meeting the driver’s in his mirror. She heard the slam of doors, the double beep of the lock.
They crossed the road towards the factory without speaking. Even if she hadn’t already recognized one of them, she would have known they were CID. Both wore suits, the younger one’s slate-blue, the other’s grey with a green wax jacket over the top, like travelling salesmen who’d left their briefcases in the car but for a masked watchfulness, a state of physical alertness she knew back to front because she had it, too. What were they doing here? Had they got something new?
The younger one stepped forward to ring the bell then turned to say a couple of words. A moment later, the door was opened by DS Thomas, who stood aside to let them in. She’d got away with it, Robin thought, but then, just before he stepped over the threshold, the older of the two men turned to look at her. DI Webster. He caught her eye and gave her a single nod.