The Sleeping and the Dead

Michael Grey was reported missing only after his foster parents had died and the executors of their wills had tried to trace him. They’d left him the small house where they’d been living. He’d have been twenty-two at the time, but when a firm of solicitors tried to track him down they discovered that no one had seen him since he was eighteen. That would have been in 1972. It was a peculiar case but Porteous tried not to read too much into it. Social Services seemed not to feel too much responsibility for kids in care once they were sixteen. They drifted in a twilight world of hard-to-let flats, hostels and mates’ floors. And if the next of kin had been named as one of the executors presumably there wouldn’t have been much incentive to trace the boy. Perhaps they would have received the profit from the house in his absence. The description was vague. Porteous had the feeling that the person reporting Michael as missing had never seen him. Nothing ruled him out from being the dead boy in the lake, but there was nothing to suggest it. There was nothing as useful as a photograph.

Carl Jackson had lived twenty miles from Cranford with his parents, who farmed sheep on the other side of the lake. He beamed gappily from a school snap attached to the file. He was sixteen and had learning difficulties and was described by the constable who’d taken the first missing-person report as ‘mentally retarded’. Because of his vulnerable status there’d been a big search for him, involving not only the police and mountain-rescue team but also members of the public. He attended Cranford Adult Training Centre and was collected every morning from the end of the farm track by a bus which picked up all the trainees from rural areas. His parents were elderly, considered by the staff at the centre as overprotective. Usually one of them waited with him for the bus and was there to meet him in the evening. In an attempt to encourage Carl’s independence it was suggested that he could make the half-mile walk down the track alone. What could go wrong? The track led only to the farmhouse. It would be impossible for him to get lost. But one day, the third that this experiment in independent living was tried, he failed to arrive home. His parents waited less than half an hour before going out to look for him. Two hours later they alerted the police. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air.

Porteous had phoned the contact number without much hope of success. The Jacksons had been in their fifties when Carl had disappeared in 1969. He was answered by a machine. ‘You’re through to Balk Farm Computing. No one is available to take your call…’ The farmhouse had been sold to yuppies, the land dispersed. It was happening to hill farms all over the north of England. It had happened to the farm where he was living.

He looked again at the photo. Carl was dressed in a check shirt, corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted V-neck pullover. Old man’s clothes. It was hard to imagine him wearing a hippy leather bracelet.

The long case clock in the corner chimed the half-hour. Half-past midnight. Porteous rinsed out his glass, stoppered the bottle and put it in the fridge. In bed he took ten minutes to go through the breathing exercise which usually helped him to relax, but he slept fitfully, haunted by the grainy photographs of Carl Jackson and Alan Brownscombe, by the fat white body in the mortuary and by Carver’s grin.

Chapter Three

They sat in Porteous’s office, which was so small that their knees almost touched, making an effort to get on.

Eddie Stout had seen Porteous cart off the boxes of files the night before and wondered what was going on. Was the man some sort of control freak? That wasn’t his job. Didn’t he trust the rest of the team? But Eddie was a Christian, a lay minister on the Methodist circuit, out every Sunday preaching to a handful of old ladies in the windswept chapels in the hills, so he had to forgive Porteous for being promoted over him and he had to make allowances. It was a strain for him, Porteous could see that. The silence between them was awkward.

Porteous liked Stout. Perhaps it would have been easier if the man had been less hospitable and generous. Why was Stout trying so hard? When Porteous had first arrived Stout had invited him to dinner at his home – an overture of friendship which had been impossible for Porteous to refuse. It had been an unexpectedly pleasant evening but Porteous felt he had disappointed Stout because he had given too little of himself away. He had taken flowers and chocolates as gifts instead of wine. Methodists didn’t drink, did they? But it seemed that nowadays they did, and after several glasses of home-brewed beer Stout had become mellow, almost Dickensian, sitting in a fat armchair, puffing his pipe, surrounded by evidence of his family. Porteous had drunk little and maintained his guard.