The radio kept her up to date with reports of the marvellous weather and how the incredible British public were finding intelligent ways of enjoying it. Like starting fires on the moors or sitting in crawling traffic queues on the roads to and from the coast.
Finally, with the ironing finished and the apple juice replaced by a long gin and tonic, she sat down calm of mind, all passion spent, at about six o’clock, just in time to hear a report of a major traffic accident on the main coast road.
There was an information number for anxious listeners. She tried it, found it engaged, tried the Purlingstones’ number, got an answering machine, tried the emergency number again, still engaged, slammed down the phone in irritation and as if in reaction it snarled back at her.
She snatched it up and snapped, ‘Yes?’
‘Hi. It’s me,’ said Pascoe. ‘You heard about the accident?’
‘Yes. Oh God, what’s happened? Is it serious? Where …’
‘Hold it!’ said Pascoe. ‘It’s OK. I’m just ringing to say I got on to the co-ordinator soon as I heard the news. No Purlingstones involved, no kids of Rosie’s age. So no need to worry.’
‘Thank God,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank God. But there were people hurt …’
‘Four fatalities, several serious injuries. But don’t start feeling guilty about feeling relieved. Keeping things simple is the one way to survive.’
‘That what you’re doing, love?’ she asked. ‘How’s it going? No mention of developments on the news.’
‘That’s because there are none. We’ve got a couple of dog teams out on the fell now and as many men as we’ve been able to drum up with all this other stuff. You’ve heard about the fires? God, people. I’m going to join the Lord’s Day Observance Society and vote for making it an offence to travel further than half a mile from home on a Sunday.’
Beneath his jocularity she easily detected the depression.
She said, ‘Those poor people. How’re they taking it?’
His memory played a picture of Elsie Dacre’s wafery face, of Tony Dacre who’d finally come down off the hillside, his legs rubbery with grief and hunger and fatigue. He said, ‘Like something’s been switched off. Like the air they breathe is tinged with chlorine. Like they’re dead and are just looking for a spot to drop in.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘Keep looking till dark. Start again in the morning. A few other things ongoing.’
Nothing he had much hope in or wanted to talk about. She tried to think of something comforting to say and was admitting failure when the doorbell rang and she heard the letter box rattle and Rosie’s voice crying impatiently, ‘Mummy! Mummy! It’s me. We’re home again. Mummy!’
‘Peter, Rosie’s back,’ she said.
‘Thought I could hear those dulcet tones,’ he said.
‘I’d better go before she breaks the door down.’
‘Give her my love. Take me when you see me.’
When she opened the door, Rosie burst in crying, ‘Mummy, look at me, I’m going to be brown as you. We had five ice creams and three picnics and Uncle Derek’s car blows really cold air and I can beat Zandra at backstroke.’
Ellie caught her, hugged her and swung her high. I remember when I was like that, she thought. So much to tell, that vocal cords seemed inadequate and what you really need is some form of optical-fibre communication able to carry thousands of messages at once.
Derek Purlingstone was smiling at her on the doorstep. He was a tall Italianately handsome man in his mid-thirties but looking six or seven years younger. His origins were humble – his father had been a Yorkshire coal miner – but he wore the badges of wealth – the Armani shirt, the Gucci watch – as if they’d been tossed into his cradle.
She smiled back and said, ‘Three picnics. That sounds a bit excessive.’
‘No, we had a breakfast picnic and a lunch picnic and a tea picnic and we drove through a fire …’
‘A fire? You were near the accident?’ she said to Purlingstone, alarmed.
He said, ‘You mean the pile-up on the main road? I heard it on the news. No, we used the back road, bit longer, damn sight quicker. The fire was up on Highcross Moor as we came back. Lot of smoke, no danger, though there seemed to be a lot of police activity round Danby.’
‘Yes. Peter’s there. There’s a child gone missing, a little girl.’
He made a concerned face, then smiled again.
‘Well, lovely to see you, Ellie, especially so much of you.’
His tone was theatrically lecherous and his gaze ran over her bikini’d body in a parody of bold lust. Ellie recalled a sentence from some psycho-pop book she’d read recently: To conceal the unconcealable, we pretend that we’re pretending it. Purlingstone was what her mother would have called ‘a terrible flirt’. Ellie had no problem dealing with it, but sometimes wondered how close it came to sexual harassment when aimed at younger women in subordinate positions at his office.
Despite this, and despite his fat-cat job in a privatized industry, she quite liked the guy and was very fond of his wife, Jill, who dressed at Marks and Sparks and had insisted that little Zandra went to Edengrove Junior rather than, as she put it, ‘some Dothegirls Hall where you pay through the nose for monogrammed knickers.’
‘No time for a drink?’ she said.
‘Sorry, but better get back. Zandra’s feeling a bit under par. Too much sun, I expect. She’s got her mum’s fair skin, not like us Latin types who can pour on the olive oil and let it sizzle, eh?’
The hot gaze again, then his hand snaked out and for a second she thought he was reaching for her breast, but all he did was ruffle Rosie’s short black hair before moving off to the Mercedes estate whose colour coincidentally matched the shade of his jeans. Coincidentally? thought Ellie. Bastard’s probably got a colour co-ordinated car for all his fancy outfits. Miaou. Envy wasn’t her usual bag, and really she was quite fond of Derek. It was just that in this weather it would be rather nice to have some form of in-car air-conditioning a touch more sophisticated than the draught through the rust holes in her own mobile oven.
Rosie’s voice broke through her thoughts, crying, ‘Mummy, you’re not listening!’
‘Yes, I am, dear. Well, I am now. Come and sit down and tell me all about it. I’m sorry Zandra’s not well.’
‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ said the girl dismissively. ‘I want to tell Daddy all about it too.’
‘And he’ll want to hear,’ said Ellie. ‘So I’m afraid you’ll have to tell it all again when he comes home.’
The prospect of having a second captive audience was clearly not displeasing. Rosie’s day now spilled out in a stream-of-consciousness spate in which sensations and emotions drowned out details of time and place. The only downbeats were that Zandra had started feeling poorly on the way home and that Rosie had lost her cross. The Purlingstones were Catholic and Zandra wore a tiny crucifix round her neck on a fine silver chain. Rosie had indicated that her life would not be complete without one. Ellie, on more grounds than she cared to enumerate, had told her, no way! But when her daughter with considerable ingenuity had ‘borrowed’ a dagger-shaped earring from Ellie’s jewel box, threaded a piece of blue ribbon through it and hung it round her neck as a cross, neither of her parents had felt able to take it away.
Ellie made a note to hide the other one of the pair, then felt guilty. Was she thinking like this because