Stone Cold Red Hot - страница 30
I accepted the offer of a cup of tea and fussed with the cats while Caroline brewed up.
“So you’ve seen Lisa, she still in Chester?”
“Yes.”
“She working, yet?”
I didn’t grasp the ‘yet’. “I don’t know, we just talked about Jennifer.”
Caroline handed me tea, a skeptical look on her face. I wasn’t sure why.
“Lisa hadn’t heard from her, nothing since seventy-six.”
“Neither have I.”
“It seems that she left her course at Keele that first term.”
Caroline settled herself on the chintz sofa. “Yeah.”
“Have you any idea where she might have gone?”
“No,” she coughed violently and blew her nose on a tissue.
It was a dead end. I had a wave of despondency. Why had I bothered coming all this way? Just to have confirmed what I already knew? I could have done it over the phone. But a phone call is rarely as good as face to face contact for getting people to open up, or for spotting discrepancies between what they say and what their body language reveals. I was there at Caroline’s to do my job as well as I could. Just get on with it.
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“Lisa told me,” she sounded a bit miffed about that. “I was away most of the summer. My parents had a place in Brittany. I missed all the action. When I came back Lisa told me about Jenny and I felt really sorry for her, she should have been on the pill. I’ve often wondered what she did about it. If I’d been in her shoes I’d have had an abortion, especially you know, with the father…”
“What?”
She flushed slightly, blew her nose again. “He was black, wasn’t he. It wasn’t like it is now. And her father would have gone mad if he knew. We never could work out if she’d told them. Lisa said she hadn’t. But when Jennifer never went back I thought she probably had told them and they’d just cut her off. He had a breakdown as well didn’t he, Mr Pickering, had to give up work, that could have been why.” There was a triumphant smile on her lips. “Especially if Jenny insisted on keeping the child.”
“You say her father would have been very upset, was he closer to her than her mother?” I tried to picture Jennifer as a Daddy’s Girl and failed.
“No,” she shuffled on the sofa, “but he had very strong opinions. He wouldn’t approve of people intermarrying. Stick to your own. Of course he was the leader at that Church as well so it’d have been awful for him that way too.”
And for Jennifer? Caroline seemed to have little compassion.
“He had a point really,” she sipped her drink, “it wasn’t so bad back then but it’s all gone too far really. I mean, I go to the shops round here and I’m the only person speaking English. Little Pakistan. And no-one dares to say anything about it. Everything’s so softly softly. What about the right to free speech?”
“So her father was a racist?” I asked coldly. “What about her mother?”
She shrugged. “Went along with his principles I suppose. She was very old-fashioned.”
“How did Jennifer get along with her parents?”
“Not well,” she wheezed a little and cleared her throat. “They were very strict. She couldn’t wait to leave home.”
“Were you and Jennifer close?”
“Seemed like it then, the four of us went around together, Lisa, Jenny, Frances and me. But once we’d all left school, we made new friends. I came here, Lisa had a place at Crewe. I went to Frances’s wedding,” she added, “and Lisa’s – that was a right farce.”
“Why?”
“Lisa getting married.” She jerked her head as if I needed reminding about something. “Thank God they never had kids.”
My incomprehension must have shown.
“You know,” she prompted.
I didn’t.
“She’s gay, isn’t she, a lesbian. There was all that stuff in the papers, last year, that was her.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what had been in the papers.
Caroline’s eyes brightened with the gossip. “She was a teacher, further education college. Word got out she was a lesbian, right, she was seeing one of her students,” she grimaced, “it was all over the papers, The Sun and everything. She had to leave her job. There was a lot of Muslim students – they won’t stand for it. Don’t you remember?”
What, one rabid tabloid witch-hunt from among all the others? No. It did help explain Lisa’s caution when I’d got in touch and her hesitation when I’d asked her how close she had been to Jennifer.