She walked the whole way to work. It took forty minutes and the wind was so bitter Freya could hardly feel her face as she went in through the doors. DC Nathan Coates came fast down the room as soon as he saw her.
‘Thought you were never coming, Sarge.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Elderly woman gone missing. Neighbour reported her going out at about half past six yesterday evening, on foot … hasn’t come home all night.’
Freya pulled off her coat and scarf and flung them on to her chair. ‘Go on.’
‘Neighbour has key. Went in last night. Everything normal, but there were some clothes laid out on the bed as if she’d been choosing what to wear.’
‘Coat and handbag gone?’
‘Yeah, she hadn’t just slipped to the letter box.’
‘This morning?’
‘No sign. Everything the same as when the neighbour went in. No note or message.’
‘Relatives?’
‘No. Widow. No children.’
‘Age?’
‘Seventy-one.’
‘I need some coffee.’
In the canteen there was the usual morning smell of frying bacon, the usual hubbub. Freya bought two coffees and they went over to a table by the window.
‘Right. Similarities with our other missing women?’
Nathan stirred three packets of sugar into his cup. ‘Woman out on her own. No apparent reason to disappear. No messages. No note. No traces. Though it’s early – we haven’t done the full checks yet.’
‘Uniform will have to go to the railway station, bus terminal, hospital and so on. Differences?’
‘She was nowhere near the Hill.’
‘That’s the most significant.’
‘She’d got dressed up properly to go out.’
‘So had the others in their way – the biker and Angela Randall were wearing gear for cycling and running and following a known routine, Debbie Parker was wearing clothes to go for a walk. I mean, none of them had slipped out in their nightie and curlers.’
‘What do you think, Sarge?’
‘I think we’ll go and see this neighbour – and then I hope we can get the DCI to take it seriously, upgrade the whole inquiry again, before someone else goes missing.’
Across the room, a table of uniforms exploded with bellows of male laughter. She had always liked the camaraderie of the station, watching the different ways people unwound and let off the tensions of a difficult shift, with jokes, laughter, backslapping and loud mutual support. There were disagreements, and friction – not everyone got on well, not everyone trusted everyone else, but that was inevitable in places where people worked together closely under pressure, punctuated by long spells of boredom. Whenever there was a particularly upsetting case – a murder, child abuse, a bad accident – ranks closed, quarrels were set aside, everyone pulled together in unspoken agreement. Policing would be intolerable if that were not the case and Freya had always been grateful for it, in London, and now here.
She drained her coffee cup and tidied up Nathan’s sugar bags neatly.
‘Gawd, Sarge, it’s worse than having a wife. Is this what it’s going to be like, I ask myself?’
‘Do I hear right?’
She glanced at Nathan as they swung through the doors out of the canteen. His pock-marked, lovely-ugly face was beetroot red.
‘Hey!’
‘No, no, listen, I haven’t said anything, hold on … only you made me think, that’s all.’
‘Well, don’t think too long. Do.’
‘It was you saying that about not losing Em … I mean, I don’t know what it’d be like not having her. If she got fed up of waiting for me and went off. Like you said.’
At her desk, Freya picked up a clean, empty plastic pot and dropped some loose change into it. ‘OK. It’s a start.’
‘What?’
‘I’m saving for your pop-up toaster.’
She picked up a Magic Marker pen and wrote in large black letters ‘NATHAN’S WEDDING PRESENT’.
He grabbed it from her and wiped it off with his sleeve. ‘Get out, they’ll have my trousers off next time I come in, whoever sees that. Have a heart, Sarge.’
‘OK, but the clock’s ticking, Nathan. Now come on.’
‘I love these little streets,’ Freya said as they turned into Nelson Street and drove down slowly looking at the numbers. ‘They can’t have changed much since they were put up by the Victorians as working men’s cottages. There are a lot in London like this, though most of them are yuppified now all the old ladies who used to whiten the step every morning have died off. They suit people and they always did – unpretentious, good gardens at the back, neighbourly. Just right.’‘You missed your vocation, Sarge … there’s 39. Should’ve been an estate agent.’
Pauline Moss was looking out for them from the window and came to the door as the car drew up. She wore an overall, and looked distraught.
‘She isn’t back, there’s been no call, nothing …’ she said, leading them into her crowded living room and shifting a tabby cat off a chair. ‘Here, let me just wipe it before you sit down, you’ll be all over his hair.’ She scrubbed vigorously at the cushions with a cloth and her hand, and inspected the result carefully. ‘I left it till half past eight, only then I just had to ring you, it isn’t normal. I’ve been up all the night worrying about her. Where’s she gone, she never goes off like that, she hasn’t spent a night away from home for years – not since long before Harry was ill and that’s at least three years, must be.’
‘I take it you know Mrs Chater well?’
‘Ever so well, we’ve been neighbours nearly thirty years. When her Harry and my Clive was alive, we were all friends together. Then Harry was ill for so long and after he died I’ve kept an eye out for her. She’s been brave, really brave, and tried hard to keep going like before, but it’s been a struggle. We don’t live in each other’s pockets you know, we have our own – what is it they say now, our own space – always have respected that. But we see each other most days, we have coffee or tea, or maybe go shopping or she comes into mine to watch a programme she likes, or I go to her and we maybe have a game of cards.’
‘When did you last see Mrs Chater?’
‘Yesterday morning. She was pegging out and I called her for a cup of coffee. I’d just baked as well. I’d had a letter from the council and I wanted her to have a look at it. Then we talked about going on a day outing next month. A coach outing, you know? We used to go sometimes, all four of us, but after Harry was ill, of course, we couldn’t, but I’ve been trying to get her to do one or two things again, pick up the reins – you have to, don’t you? She did the same for me when Clive went.’
‘Did she seem to like the idea of a day out?’
‘Yes, she did, she said it was time to look forward a bit. We talked about it a lot, I had a brochure. We liked the idea of Chatsworth. You can have a lovely day out there, they’ve beautiful grounds, you can have your lunch. It’s not too far. I was going to book, we’d just got to choose a date.’
‘So there was nothing to suggest she was going away somewhere else on her own?’
‘She’d never do that, never in a million years. Besides, you don’t go off without telling anyone, and in the evening, do you? Of course you don’t, whoever you are. And she’d only her handbag.’
‘I gather Mrs Chater had no relatives?’
‘No. They’d no children. It was always a sadness, that. Harry had a sister but she died, oh, five years back and I don’t think Iris kept up with them, they live up in Scotland somewhere, Aberdeen, that’s it. No, she was on her own when Harry went. I’m different, I’ve two sons live close by.’
‘Has she other friends?’
‘Well, yes, not close, but we both know plenty of people round here, though not so many as we used to, of course, it’s all changing, isn’t it? She did used to go to the cathedral but she stopped when she found it hard to get out. Harry had to be looked after all the time.’
‘Did you see her go out?’
‘No, I was in the bath. I heard her front door go and her footsteps pass … that was all. I didn’t think much of it, only that she hadn’t mentioned going out, but then, as I say, we don’t live in each other’s pockets.’
‘So you’ve no idea where she was going?’
Pauline had an idea but she didn’t want to mention it. Had Iris gone back to the medium? Iris had been so disappointed that Harry hadn’t ‘come through’. Had she given it another try? Well, it was up to her, private business, she’d clearly not wanted to talk about it. It didn’t seem right to mention it to two strangers, without Iris’s permission, even if they were police, and Pauline didn’t see how it could matter. But she kept the thought in her mind all the same. Maybe later, if Iris didn’t come back. Only she was going to come back, of course she was.
‘How has she seemed recently? Was she still depressed after her husband’s death?’
Pauline looked hard at the young man. He had a face only a mother could love. ‘I don’t think that’s the right word, you know,’ she said firmly. ‘There’s too much talk of people being depressed. She’d had a bereavement, her husband of forty-one years had passed on. She wasn’t depressed, you aren’t, you’re grieving, you’re sad as you can be, but it’s normal, isn’t it? If you weren’t, what kind of person would you be? But not depressed like when you have to have tablets.’
‘Sorry, love.’ He may have that face, but he had a winning smile. Pauline got up. ‘I’ll make us a pot of tea?’
‘Thought you’d never ask. Let’s give you a hand.’
Freya smiled, and stayed behind in the sitting room. Nathan could charm the birds off the trees as well as pots of tea out of ladies and it invariably helped him to find out little things that had been ‘forgotten’.
She looked round Pauline Moss’s room. Pity the original fireplace had been ripped out and replaced with a hideous electric heater. Once there must have been a wooden sash window, now there was an aluminium, double-glazed monstrosity.
She heard laughter from the kitchen and the chink of china.
The pot of tea was accompanied by home-made scones and ginger cake, all borne through on a huge tray by a grinning Nathan. Freya rolled her eyes but he gave her a conspiratorial wink. So he had gleaned something useful when chatting to Mrs Moss. Freya let him get round to it after tea had been poured, scones buttered, and Nathan had tucked in as though making up for lack of breakfast and pre-empting lunch.
Freya had a scone, and talked generally about the changes in these homely streets and how life used to be even thirty years ago when Pauline Moss and her husband had first moved in with their two young boys, about neighbourliness and its decline, working women and the loneliness of those who were left, retired and out of the loop.
‘We’ve been very lucky, Iris and me,’ Pauline Moss said, ‘we’ve had the same houses, same streets, same shops, and each other … it helps you, you know, when you’re left on your own, that some things stay the same. You rely on that. I did, Iris has. I feel for them on their own without knowing who’s next door, everything different, or being moved to some new place by the council. Not that it’s happened here, thank God, but in Bevham they pitched so many of them out when they did all that rebuilding, it killed a lot of the old people.’ She chattered on easily, occasionally reaching out to ply Nathan with another cup of tea, another scone, more cake. Freya waited.
A nut feeder hung at the window from which blue tits came to eat with little, darting movements and bright, watchful eyes, before flitting off again. The garden was well tended, with a rockery down which a small waterfall ran into a pool. A contented life, Freya thought, the old-fashioned life still lived by so many people up and down the country in ordinary places … home cooking, gardening, neighbourliness, shopping, a day’s outing on a coach to a stately home, perhaps bingo occasionally, and otherwise, evenings with the television and books from the library. Pauline Moss and Iris Chater played cards together.
Middle England, traditional values. Don’t knock it, don’t ever knock it, she thought. This is what we have come from, at bottom, this is what we are, and this is absolutely what we, Nathan and I, are here to cherish and to protect.
Nathan picked a couple of crumbs off his plate and turned a beam of appreciation on to Pauline Moss.
Freya waited a few seconds more. Nothing. She glanced at Nathan. He wasn’t giving anything away.
‘Mrs Moss, you’ve been really helpful. Now, I wonder, do you have a key to Mrs Chater’s house? I’d like to take a quick look.’
‘I don’t think you ought to go poking into her things.’
‘Of course. But there may be something you didn’t notice or think was important. We want to find Mrs Chater as quickly as possible.’
Pauline stood up. ‘You’ve got to do your job. I’ll let you in.’
‘Thank you.’
Freya watched a blue tit dart away from the feeder, alarmed by the movements through the window. Imagine living your whole life on the verge of a nervous breakdown, never being able to enjoy a quiet meal. Memory of the dinner she had enjoyed with Simon was a safe craft on which she was gliding through the calm waters of the day.
They followed Pauline Moss into 39 Nelson Street. Another empty house, belonging to a woman who had disappeared, another set of rooms full of another person’s life and private affairs. But there was a warmth and a comfort here which had been so absent from Angela Randall’s sterile little house in Barn Close. Iris Chater’s rooms were crammed full of furniture, ornaments, pictures, knick-knacks, clocks, tapestries, fire screens, plants in bowls, standard lamps, doorstops, knitting, jigsaw puzzles, rugs, mats, tray cloths, photographs, bowls, vases, containers for everything, covers for everything. Nothing was out of place, yet there was a pleasant muddle.
They looked round. In the hall, Freya examined coats and scarves, in the cupboard under the stairs looked at boots and shoes and a vacuum cleaner and suitcases. The bed was neatly made and covered with an embroidered satin quilt, the toilet seat with a fluffy lilac cover. On the bed were laid out some sensible clothes.
Iris Chater was a home person. She had not gone away. She had meant to come back. The whole place gave out that message. It was as clear to Freya as was her certainty that this missing woman was linked in some way to the others. She did not need to probe further in this cosy, cluttered, comfortable little home.