The Sleeping and the Dead (12 page)

It was as if they had depended on what he told them for their knowledge of him. Hannah struggled to explain that to the detectives. ‘I don’t think they were relatives. They probably
didn’t think there was anything sinister in his disappearance. They’d be sorry he hadn’t kept in touch, but they wouldn’t see it as their affair to meddle.’

‘What was he doing with them then?’ Stout demanded. ‘You wouldn’t just invite a strange teenager into your house.’

‘I think they were the sort of people who might.’ She paused. ‘They called him their gift from God.’

She’d always thought it was a strange thing to say. Michael had spoken of it in a slightly shamefaced way. ‘Look, Steve, that’s a big thing to live up to, you know?’ But
the detectives remained impassive and unsurprised. She continued talking, trying to give an explanation they would accept as reasonable. ‘He arrived with them out of the blue, then
disappeared in the same way. Perhaps that’s why they never reported him missing. They felt they had no claim on him.’

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Stout said. ‘That’s all very well, but they must have met up with him somewhere. He wouldn’t just have knocked on the
door.’

‘Perhaps it was arranged through a charity,’ Porteous suggested. He looked at Hannah hopefully. ‘Was anything like that mentioned, Mrs Morton? Can you remember the name of any
organization which might have put Michael in touch with the Brices?’

She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me,’ she said. ‘He liked being a mystery.’

‘All the same he must have said something. When you asked about his family, his previous school, he must have given some scrap of information.’

Despite her resistance, memories were already clicking into her brain, jerky images like an old home movie.

‘He told me a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Not all of them were true.’

‘But . . ?’ Porteous prompted.

‘But I really think his mother died when he was little. He was quite specific about that. She died of leukaemia and he could remember the funeral. Nobody had explained to him properly what
was going on. He couldn’t understand where his mother was. When a black car turned up at the house, he thought it was to take him to see her.’ Hannah stopped, then continued hesitantly,
‘It was early spring. There were crocuses on the lawn. I don’t know if that’s any help.’ She thought: Unless that was one of his fictions too.

Porteous said, ‘At present everything is helpful.’

‘There is something else.’ She paused. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she had a sense too that she was betraying Michael. But it was a matter of
self-preservation. She had to give the detectives something to get them off her back. ‘He resat the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of us.’ Again she saw she was telling
the men something they already knew and wondered what other secrets they were keeping to themselves. ‘He made up a tale about his having been ill, but it was quite similar to his story of his
mother’s illness. I was taken in by it at the time. Why wouldn’t I be? But now I work as a prison librarian and it’s occurred to me that there might be another explanation for his
missing year. I wondered if he might have been in trouble. Youth custody. Borstal, I suppose it would have been then. That would be something he wouldn’t want to admit to the Brices or to me.
That wouldn’t fit into the Michael Grey myth.’

She realized she sounded bitter and to hide her confusion poured herself another cup of coffee, though by now it was cold. Porteous jotted a few lines in his notebook but gave no other
indication of what he thought of the theory.

‘Was he the sort of lad who might have been away?’ Stout asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You work in the nick, Mrs Morton. There aren’t many well-read, nicely spoken blokes in there.’

‘More than you’d realize.’ She thought of Marty, whose consideration had led to her being there.

‘But you know what I mean,’ Stout persisted. ‘Most of the men will have been brought up with some degree of physical and emotional deprivation.’

It seemed an odd thing for a policeman to say. She took his point more seriously.

‘Michael was a brilliant actor. And he was quick and bright. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Do I think he was brought up in the west end of Newcastle or on a council estate
in Wallsend? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be astonished if that turned out to be the case.’

‘Where
was
he brought up then?’

‘West Yorkshire. At least that’s where he said he went to school.’ Hannah waited for another question: And before that? But it never came. Besides, she had told them the truth.
On Michael’s first day a girl from the upper sixth had asked which school he’d come from and he’d answered, without pausing a moment, giving her a smile: ‘A place in West
Yorkshire. You won’t have heard of it.’

When Hannah told Porteous that, he wrote it down and said seriously to Stout, ‘It seems a strange thing to make up, that, off the cuff. Check out approved schools, borstals and detention
centres for that period in Yorkshire. Or perhaps that’s where his family lived. We might find his mother’s records.’

I don’t think you will, Hannah thought, and wondered why she didn’t speak the words out loud. Porteous turned to her with his diffident smile, which wasn’t very different from
one of the expressions in Michael’s repertoire. ‘Is there anything else you remember from that first meeting, Mrs Morton?’

She didn’t answer. She thought she’d given him enough.

‘You don’t know how much this is helping us. We’re very fortunate to have found a reliable witness at this early stage. What about his voice? Could you believe that he came
from Yorkshire?’

‘It depended to whom he was talking.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was a habit. I explained he was an actor but I don’t think this was self-conscious. He didn’t realize he was changing his voice to suit the occasion. But he was. When he
was speaking to us he spoke as we did. With the Brices it was old-fashioned English. We had a biology teacher from Edinburgh. She thought he came from there too because when he spoke to her he had
something of the accent. It wasn’t imitation or that he was trying to impress. He was a sort of verbal chameleon.’

Hannah sipped cold coffee. She thought she had nothing left to tell them. Surely now they would let her go. But Porteous shifted uncomfortably in his very comfortable chair.

‘Tell us about you relationship with Mr Grey,’ he said gently. He was more like a counsellor than a police officer. ‘In some detail if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Morton. If
you could cast your mind back.’

‘We were friends,’ Hannah said.

‘More than friends surely.’

‘Not at first.’

The men waited for her to say more.

‘What are these questions about?’ She’d had enough. ‘You know who he is. Sally told me you found the dental records. There must be more efficient ways of finding what you
want than listening to my ram-blings.’

Porteous gave another little apologetic smile. ‘Unfortunately not. Apart from your ramblings we’ve very little. We know that the body in the lake was that of a young man known as
Michael Grey. One day he had toothache and Mrs Brice took him to her dentist. We’re lucky that the practice kept records, but it hasn’t provided us with a conclusive identification. It
hasn’t helped us to trace the victim’s family. Because no birth certificate was issued to Michael Grey on the date he gave as his date of birth. There are no medical records or
child-benefit records for him. There is no record of his having existed before he started school with you.’

They looked at her. It had been a long time since anyone had given her their full attention. She found it flattering. No doubt it was a technique they often used. She was taken in by it. She
dragged her memory back almost thirty years.

Her father died the summer Michael arrived. He committed suicide. He rigged up a hose-pipe from the exhaust of their Austin and the fumes killed him. Hannah didn’t find
him. He had timed it so her mother would do that when she went into the garage to fetch potatoes to peel for their supper. Mr Meek had an allotment. He kept the potatoes in the garage in wooden
trays in the dark to stop them sprouting.

Looking back, Hannah thought her father and mother had never got on. He was nervy, quick to snap. Any noise or disruption to his routine threw him. She thought perhaps she’d inherited her
own intolerance of change from him. He was a chain smoker. Every evening he came home from work, threw down his briefcase and would sit for an hour, sucking on cigarette after cigarette, going
through the imagined slights of the day. He felt he was much undervalued at the bank. No one appreciated the work he put in. The only time he was anything like content was in the allotment. Perhaps
the physical activity helped him to relax. Perhaps in the mindless routine of digging and weeding he could forget his troubles.

Hannah’s mother didn’t like the idea of the allotment. She pretended it didn’t exist. She had been pretty as a girl and could have had her pick of the lads in the town, the
ones who came back after the war. She had chosen Edward Meek over the plumbers and bricklayers because he worked in the bank. He wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. It put her on a par with
other professional wives. Perhaps she imagined dinner parties and coffee mornings, but in fact she was awkward in company and if the invitations had ever come they soon dried up. When Hannah was a
child Audrey Meek seemed to have no friends at all. She confided in her daughter, shared her loneliness and her disappointment with her. She had spent her life being disappointed.

At first Hannah thought that this disappointment had been reason enough for her father’s suicide. She supposed he felt responsible for her mother’s unhappiness; he had never been
able to live up to her expectations. Then Hannah learned it was much worse than that. By the time of his death he’d progressed to the post of assistant manager, and he’d been stealing.
Perhaps he hoped to buy his wife’s approval with little luxuries for the house, but Hannah thought it was more that he felt the bank owed him what he took. It was his way of fighting back. Of
course, he wasn’t very good at covering his tracks and he knew he would be caught. He couldn’t face it. But Hannah and her mother
had
to face it. They had to face the questions
from the bank and the police, the prying neighbours, the dreadful sympathy. And Hannah had to come to terms with the fact that her father hadn’t loved her enough to stay alive. He had put her
through this embarrassment to save himself the ordeal of it.

Then it was September and time to go back to school. Hannah was dreading it. Her father’s face had been plastered all over the local paper. Even if the teachers were too sensitive to
mention the suicide she’d be aware of their curiosity, and some of the kids, at least, would be merciless. Hannah wasn’t popular. She was known as a swat. Rock music was important then.
Status was conferred by knowledge of obscure groups and Hannah couldn’t join in those discussions. There wasn’t even a record player in her house and anyway she wasn’t really
interested. Over the holidays she’d avoided most of the people from school. She’d seen Sally a couple of times, but only in her home. She’d kept away from the pub and the
parties.

On the first day of term Michael Grey turned up. There weren’t many new kids at the school and he was immediately the centre of attention. For Hannah his appearance was a relief. It took
the heat off her. While the rest of them were gathered around him at registration she slid into the room, dumped her stuff in her locker and slipped away to her first class. There was such a crowd
around him that she didn’t even see his face. At the mid-morning break she wanted to hide again, but Sally dragged her to the common-room.

‘Look,’ Sally said. ‘You’ll have to face them sometime. Better now when they’ve got the beautiful Michael to distract them.’

He always was Michael. Never Mike or Mick.

The sixth-form common-room was a mobile classroom. It was square, flat roofed, freezing in the winter, but that September was hot, an Indian summer. Sixth formers didn’t have to wear
uniform and they’d all chosen their clothes on that first day with care. It was a season of peasant fashion. The boys wore wide trousers and cheesecloth shirts. The girls, even Hannah, were
in smocks and long flowery skirts. Michael stood with his back to the window so the light was behind him. That could have been deliberate. He had what Mr Westcott called a theatrical eye. He wore a
pair of denim jeans which looked new, a black T-shirt, and desert boots with black leather laces. His hair was blond, almost white. He had a suntan. Foreign travel was unusual those days and it was
hard to get a tan in her northern town, so that made him stand out too. There was something about him that made the others listen. It wasn’t just the novelty.

Sally nudged Hannah in the ribs. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think he’s cocky,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s good looking but he knows it.’

He can’t have heard what she said. There was music playing and everyone talked at once. But he looked over the heads of the others towards her as if he knew what she was thinking. He gave
a self-deprecating little shrug. I know, he seemed to be saying. This is all bullshit. But it’s a game and I’ve got to go along with it.

Later Hannah saw her first meeting with Michael as a turning point. After that she was seen differently within the school. She could face them all without embarrassment. It was possible that her
memory played tricks – that there were unpleasant comments about her father, days when she wanted to stay at home. It was possible that her re-creation of her friendship with Michael was as
great a fiction as the story he told about himself. But his arrival did make a difference. Some incidents remained clear and vivid. These, she was convinced, were true.

There was the day he first invited her to the Brices, for example. Hannah remembered that as soon as she started talking to the detectives. Michael was placed in the same English group as her,
and on the day of his arrival he chose the seat next to her, at one of the old-fashioned desks with the lift-up lids that you never see now. Despite her disdain, her sense that he was too cocky by
half, there was a rush of excitement when she turned and saw him there. Through habit they kept the same seats all term. They were reading
Middle-march
. The rest of the group hated it. They
found it tedious and Hannah suspected that most of them didn’t make it to the end. She loved it and so did Michael. There’d been this guy in the old place who’d been passionate
about it, he said. Who’d done it as part of his Ph.D. and passed on his enthusiasm. Hannah presumed then that the ‘guy’ was a teacher, the ‘old place’ a school. Later
she was to presume nothing. Michael said he had some notes at home. Perhaps she’d like to borrow them to help with an essay they’d been set? If she wasn’t in a hurry she could go
back with him, have a cup of tea. The old folks would be thrilled to bits.