Caroline Cunningham bore little resemblance to the pictures I’d seen at Lisa’s, even accounting for her bleary eyes and washed out complexion. The long red hair was long gone replaced by a short bobbed hairstyle in rich brown. She wore gold rimmed glasses, dangly black earrings, a fleecy grey top and black leggings.
A cat wound its way around my legs as I tried to get along the narrow hallway.
“Jasper!” she scooped the cat up. “He’s been trodden on so much he ought to look like a doormat by now. Come in here.”
The rooms were small, two up-two down as far as I could tell with a minute kitchen. The decor suited the original features; a richly tiled fireplace with cast iron surround and a brass coal scuttle matched dark patterned wallpaper and the jade green of the picture rail. The net curtains were heavy cream lace patterned with birds of paradise and there were pictures of Old Sheffield on the walls and an embroidered sampler. “Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever.” Girls’ education circa 1900.
I accepted the offer of a cup of tea and fussed with the cats while Caroline brewed up.
“So you’ve seen Lisa, she still in Chester?”
“Yes.”
“She working, yet?”
I didn’t grasp the ‘yet’. “I don’t know, we just talked about Jennifer.”
Caroline handed me tea, a skeptical look on her face. I wasn’t sure why.
“Lisa hadn’t heard from her, nothing since seventy-six.”
“Neither have I.”
“It seems that she left her course at Keele that first term.”
Caroline settled herself on the chintz sofa. “Yeah.”
“Have you any idea where she might have gone?”
“No,” she coughed violently and blew her nose on a tissue.
It was a dead end. I had a wave of despondency. Why had I bothered coming all this way? Just to have confirmed what I already knew? I could have done it over the phone. But a phone call is rarely as good as face to face contact for getting people to open up, or for spotting discrepancies between what they say and what their body language reveals. I was there at Caroline’s to do my job as well as I could. Just get on with it.
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
“Lisa told me,” she sounded a bit miffed about that. “I was away most of the summer. My parents had a place in Brittany. I missed all the action. When I came back Lisa told me about Jenny and I felt really sorry for her, she should have been on the pill. I’ve often wondered what she did about it. If I’d been in her shoes I’d have had an abortion, especially you know, with the father…”
