She nods. ‘Yeah, she gave me a cup of tea and a sausage roll and said I could go home with her, have a wash, stay the night if I wanted to. I hadn’t washed for about two weeks, I must have stank. That bath was amazing. I stayed with her for a month. Sixteen Arlington Drive. Always remember her address ’cos I was sixteen at the time, plus I’m a bit autistic like that. Anyway, her daughter kicked me out,’ she says, ‘called me a sponger. I never asked for money, not once,’ she reinforces, and from the steely look in her eyes I know she’s telling the truth. ‘She said if I ever went near her mum again, she’d call the cops. Pat didn’t want me to go. She was in tears and everything. I still have nightmares about it. It wasn’t Pat’s fault. She’s the only person who cared for me and I didn’t get to say goodbye. I never thanked her. That kills me, it does.’ Laurie stands up to leave. ‘I want to go home,’ she says, as if it’s all too much for her now.
‘Go,’ Angus tells Ian, gesturing for him to look after Laurie, to take her home. Ian follows Laurie out of the café, leaving Angus and me alone in our thoughts, until finally Angus breaks the silence, saying, ‘Sixteen Arlington Drive. Remember that address. Wehaveto track Pat down.’
20
‘Hang on, you and Angus knocked on some stranger’s door?’ says Milla, as she hands me a chopping board, knife and a brown paper bag filled with mushrooms. It’s Friday night, and I’m having supper with Milla and Dave, but Dave isn’t home from work yet, so we have the kitchen to ourselves. The children, who have started primary school after the long summer holidays, are watching television in the next-door room, before bedtime.
I describe to Milla how an eighty-something year old woman had appeared at the door, Angus asking if she was called Pat.
She’d shaken her head. As she was about to shut the door, he’d stepped forward and offered her his hand. Tentatively she shook it. She was dressed in a tracksuit, her grey hair in rollers, and was wearing dusty-pink-coloured slippers, finished off with a matching pompom on the front. ‘I’m Angus and this is Holly.’
‘Whatever it is you want,’ she’d said, chewing gum, ‘I’m not interested.’
‘We’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ Angus had reassured her, ‘or trying to sell you something you don’t need, like a de-bobbler.’
‘We’re here on behalf of a friend, Laurie,’ I said, ‘who once stayed with Pat. It was about three years ago? Did you buy this house from a Pat or a Patricia?’
‘Might have,’ she replied, guarded.
‘Is Pat still alive?’ Angus asked.
‘Touch ’n’ go.’
‘Touch ’n’ go?’ Angus and I repeated together.
‘On her last legs. Like us all.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Angus said.
‘I can’t tell you where she lives. Against the law. Confidentiality and all that.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Angus conceded.
‘But you look like a rule breaker to me,’ I suggested with a smile. ‘Sorry, I don’t even know your name?’
‘Mo. Short for Maureen.’
‘My mother’s name!’ I exclaimed.
‘Such a pretty name, it suits you,’ Angus followed up.
Mo rolled her eyes. ‘I’m never going to get rid of the pair of you, am I?’
‘Can you hear us out?’ Angus begged, deadly serious again.
He proceeded to explain, in depth, the reason for our visit.
‘I hate to break this to you love,’ Mo said, ‘but I don’t know where Pat lives anymore.’
‘Oh.’ Angus sighed. After all that.
‘But Sheila does,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye. With renewed hope, we followed Mo to another semi-detached house on the opposite side of the road. ‘Sheila, it’s Mo!’ she called through the letterbox. Another eighty-something-year-old opened the door, a miniature wire-haired dachshund snapping at her heels. As Mo recounted why we were there, Sheila stopped her.
‘I remember that girl,’ she said. ‘Pat always wondered what happened to her. She used to go to bed at night, scared to think of the wee thing out there, alone,’ Sheila confided. ‘She didn’t speak to Rochelle, that’s her daughter, for months. Don’t for God’s sake tell anyone I told you where she lives, especially not Rochelle. She’s quite scary, she is.’ She handed us a piece of paper. ‘She’s protective,’ she warned us, explaining Pat was in a nursing home in West Bay, Dorset, ‘where they filmed that good thriller,Broadchurchyou know, with Olivia Colman and the Doctor Who man. I try and talk to her ’bout once a week. It’s only forty minutes from here but I don’t have a car so… but Pat likes to talk. Half the time I’m not sure she knows it’s me. She’s lost her marbles a bit, you know.’
‘Like us all,’ Mo had added.
‘So the three of you are driving to West Bay this Sunday?’ Milla asks.
