‘So where did she go?’ I said.
Elsie looked at me and smiled. ‘She went to Whitby, don’t you remember?’
I don’t remember anything. I just remember standing on the town-hall steps with my mother, and looking up at the clock.
‘Did she?’ I said.
‘You saw the long second, Florence. You told her to go to Whitby. Eileen Everest never went to Llandudno in the end. You stopped her.’
FLORENCE
The policeman held up his hands. He was clearly an optimist, because it hadn’t worked the last three times he’d tried it, so there was really very little chance of it working now.
‘If you could all just be quiet for one second,’ he said, ‘we’ll try to establish a system for speaking to everyone individually.’
But the second half of his sentence fell into a shouting match between two residents about whether a chief inspector was higher up than a superintendent.
‘Perhaps we could borrow one of the rooms?’ said Miss Ambrose.
The woman who owns the hotel was called Gail. Gail with an ‘i’. Each time she introduced herself, she explained to us it was spelled with an i, despite no one ever finding the need to write it down. Gail gave a little sniff. ‘Another one?’ she said. Miss Bissell had experienced a fainting episode next to the whalebones, and had already been taken into the kitchen with a police sergeant and a bottle of brandy.
‘Maybe the television room?’ said Miss Ambrose.
‘That’s out of the question. It’s Tuesday,’ said Gail, rather mysteriously, but she didn’t elaborate. ‘I suppose I could let you have the staff rest room. Although you’ll need to be out by eight, because I’ve got a new shift coming in and I’ll need to change my slacks.’
We sat in a row, waiting our turn. For a rest room, it wasn’t very restful. The chairs were wooden and mismatched. Some of them had clearly escaped from the dining room and clung to their usefulness with glue and Sellotape. People appeared and ignored us. They banged locker doors and turned keys, and they put on layers of uniform and turned themselves into someone else. I tapped my feet to pass the time, but Elsie kept glaring at me, and so I tapped my fingers on last night’s menu instead.
‘Where do you think Ronnie is?’ I kept saying. ‘Someone should be keeping their eye on him.’
‘He’ll be outside.’ Jack nodded towards the door. ‘Along with everyone else. He can’t get up to much with all these policemen around.’
‘Why don’t we play a game?’ Elsie said. ‘Why don’t we try that shelf over there?’
I studied the shelf. ‘Clock. Postcards. Dying plant.’ I hesitated. ‘Candle?’
‘Bigger,’ she said.
‘Candlestick?’
‘Wonderful!’
‘Professor Plum, in the conservatory.’ Then, ‘Why did I say that?’
‘Because it’s a board game,’ she said. ‘Do you remember? You play it in the day room sometimes, after small amounts of persuasion.’
‘Do I? I don’t remember. Where do you think Mrs Honeyman has gone?’
Elsie paused. ‘Perhaps she just got a little confused. Wandered off. People do from time to time.’
‘She’ll be back,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll see.’
I wasn’t sure if she would, but I didn’t say anything. Old people disappear all the time. We allow them a moment of sympathy, and then turn the page of the newspaper. Do we ever know if they’re returned to where they belonged? I’m not entirely sure that we do. Elsie started talking about how the plant on the shelf needed watering, and so I clung to that thought instead. Sometimes, you need to hold on to a small worry, to stop you from reaching out for something bigger.
Jack turned around in his seat and looked at the door for the sixth time.
‘It’s not going to make them move any faster, you know,’ Elsie said.
‘Being questioned by the police is the most exciting thing that’s happened in years,’ I said. ‘People won’t give it up without a fight.’
‘I don’t know why they need to speak to us anyway.’ Jack turned back to us. ‘We weren’t even there. We were in the music shop.’
I said, ‘As long as they don’t ask the reason we were in the music shop.’
‘Do you think they’ll want to know why?’ said Elsie.
‘It’s a free country,’ Jack said.
As he spoke, the staff-room door opened and the policeman ushered out the latest interviewee, who was still in the middle of a sentence.
‘… and that’s why I pay my taxes,’ he was saying.
The policeman nodded and blocked the way back with his shoulders. Jack struggled to his feet. ‘I’m next,’ he said.
But Handy Simon walked past us and slipped through.
‘Well I never did.’ Jack watched the door for a very long time. Even after it had closed.
I squinted at the shelf on the opposite wall. ‘I think I’m going to water that plant,’ I said.
HANDY SIMON
Handy Simon had never been a big fan of policemen. He was stopped by one once for having a tail-light out, and it took him three days to recover. It wasn’t so much the uniform, because he was used to his dad’s, it was the worry that he might be mistaken for someone else. Simon always thought he looked like the photofits on Crimewatch. There was something about his face. Something universal. He could never see it himself, but other people seemed to, so whenever he heard a loud bang, he’d look at the clock and make a mental note of what he was doing, just in case it turned out to be gunfire and he found himself sharing a cell with a tattooist called Daryl.
The policeman smiled at him across the desk, although Simon couldn’t decide if it was a smile of reassurance or a smile of sudden recognition.
‘We’ll just get a few details straight first,’ he said, and his pen hovered over the paper.
Simon confirmed his name and address as clearly as he could. He even repeated it a couple of times, just to be on the safe side.
‘And you’ve worked at Cherry Tree for how long?’
‘Just over five years. Five years, two months and fifteen days.’
The policeman looked up and smiled again. The smiling was unexpected and most off-putting.
‘Five years? You must enjoy it,’ he said.
This was a bit of a curveball. Simon shuffled around in his seat whilst he tried to think of an answer. It was important to be honest, but he didn’t want to be too honest, in case it was written down in evidence and later mentioned in court.
‘It has its ups and downs,’ he said eventually.
The policeman’s pen just hovered.
‘Aren’t you going to write that down?’ said Simon. ‘In evidence?’
‘What?’
‘That it has its ups and downs?’
‘No. I was just making conversation.’ The policeman coughed. ‘When was the last time you remember seeing Mrs Honeyman?’
‘Are you still making conversation?’ said Simon. ‘Or is it a question?’
‘No, it’s a question.’
‘I’m not certain. It’s difficult to be sure.’
‘Difficult to be sure?’
‘I mean they all look quite similar, don’t they? Unless you’re concentrating.’
‘And you weren’t concentrating?’ said the policeman.
Simon sat back. ‘Of course I was concentrating. You won’t find anyone who concentrates more than I do. Or does as many head counts.’ He reached for his backpack, but then he realised his clipboard was already on the desk. ‘She was definitely there at the start of the walk, because I counted her.’
The policeman looked at the chart. ‘But by the time you reached the park gates, she’d disappeared.’
Simon nodded.
The policeman spent the next few minutes writing, and all Simon could hear was the scratch of his pen on the paper.
‘So how would you describe Mrs Honeyman, Simon?’
Simon stared at a stain on his jacket. ‘I’m not really sure.’
‘Why don’t we start with what she looks like?’
‘Don’t you already know?’
‘We do, but I want to hear what you have to say about it.’
‘Average height. Average build.’ Simon continued to stare at the stain in the hope it might offer some inspiration. ‘Grey hair.’
‘That could describe most people on this trip, couldn’t it, though?’