Free The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher Page B

had suddenly altered. From the hall, the noise of dialling.
    “Hello?” Katherine said. “Hello, Margaret? This is Katherine Glover, Malcolm’s wife … Yes, that’s right, at the Dennises … Yes, I remember. I know this sounds a little strange, but did Malcolm have anything—Oh, I see … Really? That sounds unusual … No, I didn’t. Well, I’m sure there’s some perfectly innocent explanation—he’ll be home soon, I expect. Thank you so much—I hope I’m not disturbing you …”
    And she put the phone down, then came back into the dining room. She didn’t sit down and go on with her dinner. She just stood there. “That was your father’s secretary,” she said, “Margaret. She said he left the office at lunchtime and didn’t come back.”
    “He was here at lunchtime,” Jane said, “and then he went out again. I thought he’d gone back to work.”
    “Yes,” Katherine said. “You said.”
    She went to the window, peered out through the net curtains. She seemed lost in thought. “Look,” she said, “the new people are moving in. There’s a removal van.”
    “It came this afternoon,” Daniel said, still eating. “They’ve left it, they’ve not started unpacking the furniture.”
    “Did you see them?” Katherine said absently.
    “No,” Daniel said. “They’ll be moving in tomorrow, I suppose.”
    “I wonder,” Tim said, “where my dad’s gone.”
    “You don’t think there’s anything wrong, do you?” Jane said. She remembered the stories she’d constructed in the garden as she saw the figure in the window. It seemed odd already that she’d imagined burglars.
    “No,” Katherine said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong.”
    But then she went out again and started making phone calls, to the hospitals first and, finally, the police. One by one the children took their plates to the kitchen; Jane washed up, listening to the repeated query in her mother’s politest, most telephone voice. It seemed to her that there was something of blame and guilt in it. She could not understand it.
    For years Katherine had been in the habit, in the mornings, of getting into the car with the children and Malcolm. First, Malcolm dropped off Daniel at Flint, the senior school—he insisted on being dropped a good three hundred yards from the gates, and she knew for a fact that most of his friends had exactly the same arrangement with their parents—then Tim, at his primary school, and Jane at the new middle school, less self-consciously getting out at the gate. Finally Malcolm dropped her in Broomhill with its parade of shops and went off to work.
    That had been her routine since Tim started school. She did it almost every day, saying, as if it needed justifying, that it was nice to have a regular routine each day, and hers was to buy the groceries before ten each morning, then head back to do the housework. In reality, she hadn’t minded the housework when Tim was too small to go to school, just as she didn’t really mind it when the children were on their school holidays. It was the days when the four of them set off, leaving her on her own, with no one to talk to and nothing but dull tasks to do, that wore her down. The noise of Radio 2, so mild a burbling complement to breakfast, had to be turned off, or had to be listened to as if it were company; so, by the time Tim was seven, she had taken to getting into the car, going to Broomhill and filling the morning with the day’s small shopping—the fishmonger or the pork butcher, the little supermarket, the greengrocer—maybe the bank, and definitely the little tea-shop for a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.
    Crosspool was closer to shop in, of course, but it was a 1920s development, a shabby parade with holes in the Tarmac and a hardware shop with Chinese-made plastic flowers in the window, and no tea-shop. Broomhill was stone-built Victorian villas—it was a part of the city that hadn’t been bombed in the war. It had a dress shop, a