As She Left It: A Novel Read online

  “Right next door like that, I mean,” she said. “If Craig was playing in his yard and your back door was open with the fly curtain like it usually is, you might have heard something.”

  “I was upstairs,” said Mrs. Pickess. “In the front bedroom. I was putting ironing away.”

  “When?” Opal said.

  “That day,” said Mrs. Pickess. “When do you think?” Her voice was growing rough now, and just a little unsteady.

  “But when that day?” said Opal.

  “When Karen came to the door,” Mrs. Pickess said. “I saw her standing on the step and in she went. I heard her shouting, screaming really, and then banging in and out the back and front, all three of them. Up and down the lane in back, up and down the street in front. I went straight down to see what was wrong. Anyone would have. Even her at the top was out. And that lot down the bottom. And your mother. And the Taylors at number four. You’d not know them. They hadn’t been here long and they didn’t stay long after, I can tell you.”

  Opal returned, on tiptoe, to the point Mrs. Pickess had raced away from. “But Mrs. Pickess, even if you were putting your ironing away when Karen came, you might not have been upstairs in the front bedroom when Craig actually … you know, if he left the yard or if someone came in. Do you put it away as soon as you’re done?”

  She did not want to answer, not one little bit. But Opal had played a masterstroke: she’d asked about housework. More than that even, she’d hinted that Mrs. Pickess might not set about it with order and precision.

  “Of course I do!” she said. “I don’t know what’s worse between pressing stuff that’s too damp and having to hang it back up on the pulley again after, or leaving it dried out in a basket for days, waiting. I iron when it’s dry enough to iron, always have, never fail. And then I put it away. Catch me leaving a batch of shirts hooked over the door to get food smells in them!”

  “Food smells,” said Opal. “You iron in the kitchen then.”

  Mrs. Pickess stared back at her, her eyes wide and her lip quivering. “I never heard a thing,” she said. “I told the police. I heard not a voice nor a step. Didn’t hear the gate. Didn’t hear a car. Nothing.”

  “A car?” Opal said. “Do they think a car came up the lane? Did someone else see one?”

  “No!” Mrs. Pickess said, shouted almost. “I’m just saying, I heard nothing. And I saw nothing. All morning. It was as quiet as a grave. I had my door open all morning, and there wasn’t a peep from him.”

  Of course not Opal thought to herself. And it was hardly surprising since he’d disappeared the night before. Why then would Mrs. Pickess be so swimmy and quavering that way?

  “It must have been dreadful,” she said, taking pity at last.

  “It was,” Mrs. Pickess said. “They searched everywhere, you know. The police. Searched the houses and all over. Searched right through my house, took the bath panel off and went up to the attic, into the eaves, everywhere. They turned this place upside down.” Opal looked around, picturing coppers moving about her mum’s kitchen, too big for the little rooms, all starched serge and squeaking shoe leather, opening cupboards, their faces set like cement, not reacting to anything they had to sort through. But they still knew how to tell you what they were thinking.

  “Mrs. Taylor,” Mrs. Pickess was saying, “she told me they took up the floors.”

  “Well, no wonder they left!” Opal said. “They didn’t take up your floors too, did they? What for?”

  “No, not the Taylors’ floor,” Mrs. Pickess said. “In here. Your mother’s.” She sat back and folded her arms, watching the news settle into Opal, waiting to see how it would land. Then she gave it another little nudge. “Because Karen’s ex used to knock about with her.”

  Opal nodded. Made sense. She read the papers, sometimes. A kiddie goes missing and its mum and dad aren’t together anymore, the first thing you check is the dad. And if he’s got a girlfriend, of course you’re going to have good long look at her, and if she looks like Nicola, then it would be criminal not to go over the place carefully. She was still nodding, but there was something going on her chest, like when you put a clean trainer in the dryer to stop your pillow going lumpy.

  “And who told them?” she said. “About Mum and Robbie Southgate. Margaret?”

  “No!” Mrs. Pickess said. “Don’t you go saying that to Margaret, she never said a word about it.”

  “Karen then? She’d a bloody cheek. Margaret thinks Robbie walked out on Karen. I know she does, and I wouldn’t poke my nose in to put her right, but that’s not what my mum told me.”

  “Well, who’s to say?” said Mrs. Pickess, desperately. “It was all such a long time ago.”

  “Me, for a start,” Opal said. “My mum didn’t lie to me. I wish she bloody had—there were things she told me that no kid should have to know. If she said Karen kicked him out, then Karen kicked him out, okay?” She could hear her voice, harsh and ugly, and she could imagine the face to match, but she couldn’t help it. Except she would have to help it, wouldn’t she? If she was going to find out what really happened to little Craig, she would have to handle anything that came along, listen to anything anyone told her without getting angry.

  “Sorry,” she said, managing to smile after she had swallowed hard. “It’s just, she was still my mum, even if she was … troubled.”

  “I know, love,” said Mrs. Pickess, and as well as a bit of kindness in her voice, there was something else. Opal turned her head to one side and looked at the woman. What would you call that other thing in her voice?

  “How did you know it wasn’t Margaret?”

  “What?” said Mrs. Pickess. The look was gone now and Opal had worked out what to call it as she watched it go: relief. Relief at an awkward moment got by.

  “Was it you? Did you tell the cops that Mum knew Robbie? Did you set the police on her?”

  “I thought Margaret would have told them already,” Mrs. Pickess said, shrugging. “I mentioned it. I thought they’d already know.”

  “You thought my mum would have hurt a little kid?” Opal said. The trainer was thumping around in the tumble dryer again.

  “She had no time for him,” said Mrs. Pickess, finding reserves of courage from somewhere.

  “So you said ‘go over the road, Mr. Policeman, and take up the floors’?”

  “They didn’t find anything,” said Mrs. Pickess. “It’s better to know, innit? It’s better than wondering.”

  “Nobody would have been wondering if you hadn’t started them.”

  “Best to get everything out in the open,” said Mrs. Pickess. “Not let things fester. And it wasn’t your mother I was thinking of. It was everyone else in the house. In and out, like Piccadilly Circus, and Friday nights were always the worst of all.”

  “I remember,” Opal said. But she didn’t remember. She wouldn’t remember. She was going to concentrate on Craig and Craig alone. And the little bed girl. And Fishbo. And then there would be no time left to think about anything else and that was the best way.

  “I better go,” said Mrs. Pickess. “I’m sorry I upset you.” Opal said nothing. “Put it out of your mind, eh? It’s all a long time ago now even if it is new to you. Don’t go raking it back up when everyone’s taken years to get it behind them, eh?” Still, Opal didn’t speak. She stood and walked through to the front with Mrs. Pickess, opened the door and stood while the old woman stepped down onto the street, holding the door jamb to help herself keep steady. She was rattled, for sure.

  “I hear what you’re saying, Mrs. Pickess,” Opal said. “I can’t agree that Denny’s got it behind him though. Or Margaret. Or Karen, wherever she is. And you just said yourself, it’s better to know, better than wondering.”

  Mrs. Pickess only blinked at her.

  “So here’s what I’m wondering,” Opal said. “What’s wild Friday nights at my mum’s got to do with anything if it was a Saturday morning when Craig went away?”

  SIXTEEN

&nb
sp; THE NOTES FROM THE bedposts weren’t exactly a lullaby, but Opal read them over just before she went to sleep anyway, because in the morning she was going to forget Craig for the day—she whispered an apology to his ghost, in case it was listening—and forget Leeds too. It was a surprise how much she hankered to get up out of the city and see the moor. Probably because a moor would do the same job as the sea—letting her eyes fix on something long and low stretching across in front of her instead of little houses and buses and lampposts, shelves and cages and boxes, all right in front of her nose. And marching into an auction room held no fears for her, not after Walrus Antiques.

  But Claypole’s Auctions was in a different league from Billy and Tony with their cups of tea and flirty quarrels. For one thing, it was huge—some enormous grey stone building that had obviously once been something else, only Opal couldn’t work out what, since it wasn’t fancy enough for a church or plain enough for a factory. And the reception that you had to go through to get to where all the stuff was looked like a bank or something, with a blue carpet and a little coffee table and leather chairs, big plants in pots and glossy brochures fanned out everywhere.

  She was dozy and hot from rocking along on the bus—she’d picked the shady side in the station, but as soon as they swung out onto the road the sun had come hammering in at her, and one side of her face had been baked all the way so that it felt as tight and shiny as a bun—and everyone else strolling round the viewing rooms looked so very respectable, not like people you’d think would go to an auction at all. Men in blazers and hairy green jackets, women in striped shirts and navy jackets and—God almighty—pearls. And it was Sunday, which meant they’d all been at church, and here was Opal in her jeggings and a cami with her hair scraped up in a bundle. She skulked around at the back of a room full of chairs—same as Walrus, nobody seemed to care much for chairs—and kept away from the glass cases where the respectable people were peering in at jewelry, some of them even screwing monocles like little lengths of copper piping into their eye sockets and leaning in so close that their heads kept bonking on the glass. They all had stapled sheets of paper too, and Opal couldn’t tell where they had got them.

  Looking around, what she did see was a lad in a brown overall whisking across the top of an aisle lined either side with dressers and chests and, hopping every few steps to flick her flip-flop back on, she plunged after him.

  “Excuse me?” she said. “Pal? Oi? Scuse me!”

  He turned round and gave her a swift up and down, then he stuck his pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

  “Can I ask a question?” she said.

  He smirked at her, leaned against a sideboard, and crossed his ankles. She smiled up at him.

  “I bought a bed from here a couple of weeks ago and … ”

  “Bed problems, eh?”

  She managed to keep smiling. “No seriously, listen! I didn’t actually buy it from here, I bought it in a shop and they got it from here, but what I’m wondering now is—”

  “You’d have to take it back to the shop if you’ve changed your mind, doll,” said the lad.

  “No, it’s not that,” said Opal, thinking it wouldn’t take half as long if he’d just let her tell him instead of guessing. “What it is, is I want to know where you got it from. Claypole’s. Where it was before it came here.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Well,” Opal said. Billy and Tony had coached her on this. “Prove-

  nance.”

  “Can’t help you,” said the lad. “Can’t pass out customer info. However—”

  “Okay, not provenance,” she said. “How about this? I found something in it that I think the original owner might want back.”

  “In a bed?” he said. He was smirking again and he leaned forward, close enough so that she could smell his aftershave, one of the cheap ones that smells like sherbet. “What did you find?” He was practically leering now.

  “Behave,” Opal said. “If you tell me the name, I’ll tell you what it was.” She put her hand up to twirl her hair but remembered it was in a scrunchie.

  “No way,” he said. “I couldn’t divulge that kind of information from one customer to another. However … ” This time Opal decided to let him finish, smiling up at him; if it cost her going out for a coffee with him it would be worth it. “What I might let slip in the throes of passion … know what I mean?”

  Opal stopped smiling and took a step backwards.

  “Half an hour in the van?” he said.

  Opal stepped another pace away from him, staring.

  “Oh, come off it, love,” he said. “You trying to make out I’ve shocked you? Sod off out of it.” He laughed again, a very different laugh this time. “Bloody pikeys!” Opal had lowered her head, but she could see from the corner of her eye another pair of black doc shoes and the hem of another brown coat coming up to join the first one. Her stomach did a flip forward. Where were all the church people in their pearls now?

  “That’s no kind of language for the floor, Jordan,” said the new man. Opal raised her head again. “And no way to talk to a young lady, even on your own time. Get out the back. There’s two vans want tidying.”

  Jordan swaggered away with one last leer at Opal. She looked at her knight in armour.

  “What was that all about?” he said, but Opal couldn’t speak. He looked so much like her dad, or at least in the dim light of this warehouse he did, and her eyes filled. “Hey, now!” he said. He reached forward, but of course he didn’t really touch her, not her bare arm or bare shoulder. He’d never. “What’s to do?”

  “It was my own fault,” Opal said. “I was being cheeky, asking for a favour. I walked right in to it.”

  “Wait, no! Stop that,” the man said and this time he did just touch his knuckle to the outside of her arm. “There’s nothing you could have asked that would have earned you that.”

  Opal sniffed and nodded.

  “Sorry, yeah, you’re right,” she said, and she raised her fists to her face, quickly reviewed her morning to remind herself whether she had mascara on, and scrubbed at her eyes.

  “So what was your cheeky favour then?”

  “I asked him to tell me where you’d got something you sold on,” Opal said. “Confidential customer information. I should have known.”

  “Confidential?” said the man. “You want to be here on a sale day, love. If the auctioneer thinks there’s any swank about where summat come from, you can’t shut him up. We had a cabinet in that had once been in Newburgh Priory a while back, and he were practically giving out Lady Wombwell’s knicker size. No holding him.”

  Opal giggled. “Who’s Lady Wombwell?” she said. “Is that a real name?”

  “Oh, she’s a big noise round here. Her and her knickers. Anyroad, it’ll have been an estate sale, more’n probably, and so there’s nothing to be confidential about. Aye, most of Claypole’s best clients are dead.”

  And he took her back through to the reception with the blue chairs and pot plants and used a key from his big bunch to open a filing cabinet and find the records from the right day.

  “Hmph,” he said, reading off the page. “Not an estate sale, as it goes. Looks more like somebody clearing out the attic. Silver, silver plate, some medals, bit of furniture, fox fur.” He flipped through the pages a bit more. “It’s all the way in Leeds. Says ‘N Fossett, Far Headingley’.”

  “That’s just up the road from me,” Opal said. He was reading out the address and, grabbing a biro off the desk, she wrote it on her hand.

  “Most of it’s gone,” the man said. “No reserve, see? Funny that.” He was talking to himself more than Opal now, flicking the pages and running his fingers down the inventory. “No reserve,” he said again.

  Opal made a mental note to ask Billy and Tony what that meant and why it was funny, then thanked the man and left, stepping back out into the muggy, stale heat of the day, holding her hand stretched out like a starfish to stop the ink from smudging.

>   SEVENTEEN

  ALL DAY AT WORK on Monday, she was thinking about N Fossett of Far Headingley and what she would say if she actually plucked up courage to go and knock on their door. Especially, she was thinking about what connection there might be between N Fossett and the little bed girl. Would they even know her? Would she be an old, dead relation maybe? Or did N Fossett buy the bed at an auction too, years ago? And now they’d changed their mind about furniture and gone all modern? And would it be Mrs. or Mr. N Fossett? Opal didn’t think there were that many N names for girls, same as O. She had been the only O girl right through school, although there were always a few Olivers and Osmans on the boy side.

  So what would she say to Mr. Neil or Norman or Neville Fossett? That she had found something that belonged to him? She didn’t want to get that nice man at Claypole’s into trouble. She could say Jordan had given her the address; she didn’t mind what trouble he got into. But what exactly she would say depended on what N Fossett told her. If his mother or his granny had slept in the bed, she’d probably keep quiet about the letters. It was bad enough reading what a stranger long ago had written in secret on dark frightened nights. If it was someone you knew …

  “Earth to Opal.” It was Kate and Rhianne on their way back from a break, and Opal’s heart sank. They had seen her the day she was crying at the front desk when she came for the job—stopped flirting with Security to watch her—and they’d got interested in her right then. But it was the dinner break they heard her talking back to rude boys that really meant she’d never shake them off.

  “Opal, isn’t it?” one lad had said, from the next table along in the canteen.

  “Op-al Fruits, made to make your mouth water!” his friend sang as if he was some kind of genius for thinking it up.

  “Congratulations,” Opal said. “You’re the millionth person to crack that joke today. You’ve won a smile.” And she moved the corners of her mouth up and down again, for about a second.