White Nights - Ann Cleeves [119]
‘I’d like that very much,’ Kenny said. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’
‘Not at all.’ She smiled, and he saw that she had quite a pretty face. ‘I like comfort food myself.’
She brought up the subject of Lawrence while she was cooking the chips. She cooked them the old-fashioned way, with oil in a big pan and a basket, so there was the noise of them frying. She had her back to him, so it was hard to tell what she was thinking. The sausages were in a frying pan and they smelled very good. She’d made him a big mug of tea as soon as they got into the kitchen and he sat with his boots off at the table, drinking it. He was just thinking it was a pity she’d never remarried when she started speaking.
‘Have the police been in touch with you?’
‘About the bones in the Pit? No. I phoned Jimmy Perez this morning but he was out.’
‘You think it’s Lawrence?’
‘I think it was too much of a coincidence for it not to be.’
‘I suppose they’ll be able to tell,’ she said. ‘All those things you read about. Forensics.’
‘I just want to know,’ he said.
She cracked three eggs on the side of the pan and added them to the sausages, lifted the chip basket so it rested just above the oil, then turned round to him.
‘I felt that way when Andrew drowned,’ she said. ‘But sometimes I think hope is better.’
‘Do you remember that summer when Lawrence disappeared?’ he asked. ‘I wasn’t here. I was away in Fair Isle, working.’
She took two plates from the warming oven at the bottom of the Rayburn, carefully lifted out the eggs – two for him and one for her – and the sausages, then shook the oil from the chips and tipped them on to the plates.
‘I wasn’t here then. I was in Scalloway.’ She pushed a knife and fork across the table to him. He couldn’t tell what she made of the question. He didn’t know what she was thinking at all. ‘Eat up while it’s hot.’
‘But you’d hear what was going on. What were folks saying?’
‘Just what they’ve been saying ever since. That he asked Bella Sinclair to marry him and she turned him down, so he took a great temper on him and left the islands.’ She picked up a chip with her fingers and blew on it before putting it into her mouth. Then she frowned. ‘He did have a temper, Kenny. You know he did. You remember when we were children, him scrapping in the schoolyard. The teacher having to pull the boys apart. He always had to be the best, the strongest. Always in competition, even with you.’
Kenny thought of the two of them racing to finish singling the neeps. Lawrence was the quickest, but his own rows were the neater. He wasn’t sure there was much of a competition, but it was true that Lawrence always wanted to win.
‘You never heard anything else? That he’d picked a fight over work? Fallen out with anyone?’
It occurred to Kenny that he might have to apologize to Bella when all this was over. Perhaps she’d had nothing to do with his brother’s disappearance after all.
‘No,’ Aggie said. ‘I heard nothing like that.’
Chapter Forty
Back in the house, Kenny sat in his chair in the kitchen and dozed. He wasn’t used to eating such a big meal at lunchtime. The telephone woke him with a start. He rushed into the hall, thinking it would be Jimmy Perez, but it was Edith. He looked at his watch and saw that it was three o’clock.
‘Are you OK, Kenny? Is there any news?’
He felt guilty then. He should have phoned her. She’d have been worrying about him all afternoon.
‘No news,’ he said. ‘But I’m fine.’ He didn’t tell her about the big fried meal Aggie had cooked for him. He’d enjoyed the meal so much that it seemed like a guilty secret. He knew Aggie wouldn’t tell anyone about it.
‘Do you still want to come over?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He didn’t feel panicky any more, but the lunch with Aggie had given him a taste for company.
When he walked into the care centre through the big double doors and saw the people sitting in the sunny room, dozing or chatting, he thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to end his days here. He would be with