OK, first – kitchen drawers.
No.
Sideboard. No. Gareth’s wardrobe. Nothing remarkable in, on, underneath nor behind. Under one of the mattresses? No. Chest of drawers, bedside locker, behind the bath panel, under the bed, no, no, no, no. Every other nook and cranny, no. Purposefully, she clattered the stepladder up the stairs, heaved her way through the overhead hatch and into the loft.
Three hours later she was in the shower ridding herself of the dust from rifling every box and suitcase and cobwebby pocket of roofing felt that looked as if it might be a hiding place.
But, no.
Thoughtfully, she returned to the shirt, wielding the shears carefully along the pattern pieces, pinning the darts, tacking for the gathers at either end of the sleeves. She switched on the sewing machine and threaded it to wind the bobbin.
A car stopped outside in the lane.
She paused. Then stretched up like a meerkat to peep over the sill. A little white hatchback had pulled up and a young man stepped out and made for one of the neighbouring houses. She turned back to her work, wanting to spit like a camel. What had she imagined would be out there? A black Mercedes?
She paused. Her eyes returned to the view from the window.
In a moment, she’d stamped her feet into her canvas shoes and was jogging downstairs and outside, snatching up the car keys en route.
Why hadn’t she thought of the damned car?
Glove compartment, door pockets, seat pockets, under the seats. Nothing. She threw open the boot, tipping out the contents of a plastic toolbox with a shrill scream of spanners. No. She halted, for the first time uncertain. No?
Then she saw a little loop, just below the boot catch. Pulling it up sharply, she found the floor of the boot came up and she was staring at the spare wheel.
And there, cradled by the hub, was a blue canvas pouch, neat and new.
She slid open the nylon zip. Inside laid a mobile phone, a set of keys and a blue building-society passbook.
Her fingertips went numb. She hadn’t had much experience with mobile phones but knew enough from Bryony and George to switch it on and locate the phone book. The only entries read:
Dad
Ivan
Melvyn
STM
This phone
Valerie
The keys looked like a front door key and a back.
The opening balance in the passbook had been £200,000.
About £120,000 of it remained.
Diane sat in the car for several minutes outside Harold’s lovely house, admiring the fish-eye dormers and the sweeping lawns. Gareth’s father’s house. It compared badly to Gareth’s mother’s house on the Brightside Estate – and that had been the best of a lifetime of bad lots. In the huddle of L-shaped terraces slotted like a jigsaw around car parks, greens and graffitied play areas, the Jenner house on the Brightside had been in a row with maroon front doors and a dustbin alcove alongside. The Brightside. The councillors must’ve been on something when they’d dreamed that one up.
When Gareth had first taken Diane home she’d been wiping sweaty palms on her jeans, she’d been so nervous.
‘It can’t be as bad as meeting your parents was for me,’ he joked.
They found Wendy, a large, tired-looking woman, in her sitting room, setting small stitches in a ripped shirt pocket. At Gareth’s laconic introduction, ‘This is Diane,’ she removed black-rimmed glasses to stare. Simultaneously, Melvyn and Ivan appeared, each as dark as Wendy, to have a peep at what Gareth had brought home.
The room was long and narrow with a dining table at one end. A brown suite surrounded a smoked-glass coffee table on a mottled brown carpet, and the walls were beige. With five people there, three of them strapping lads, the room seemed small.
