‘Thanks,’ I said. I don’t know if he heard me.
I wasn’t about to start creeping round old warehouses. JB could wait till tomorrow. But I was pleased. At last something was moving. Someone had met Martin, might even know where he was now. As for me, there was only one place I wanted to be and it didn’t take me long to get there. Bed.
On Wednesdays and Thursdays Ray is in charge of the kids: Breakfast, school run, bedtime, the lot. I lay in bed for all of ten minutes, luxuriating in that small sense of freedom. The smell of toast and clinking of pots drifted up from below. In the old days, I’d have burrowed back under the duvet till lunch-time, but Maddie had buggered up my sleep patterns for good. Ray’s mum, Nana Tello (the kids shortened it from Costello), complained bitterly about waking at five o’clock and not being able to get back to sleep. I was heading for the same fate.
Maddie and Tom clattered up the stairs to yell goodbyes.
‘Mummeee,’ Maddie began, ‘I don’t want to go to school.’ Her lower lip trembled.
‘Well, you’ve got to. I’m going to work,’ I slung back the covers and grabbed my dressing-gown, ‘Ray’s going to college and you’re going to school.’ To eliminate further discussion, I picked her up and thundered downstairs, Tom at my heels. She was still giggling as Ray shepherded them out the door. An improvement on most mornings.
Over breakfast, I considered whether to ring Mrs Hobbs. I’d promised to be in touch early in the week. Best to wait until I’d met JB. Hopefully, there’d be more to report.
I got the bus to town. Parking was a nightmare and I didn’t want to push my luck too many times by doing it illegally.
From Piccadilly Gardens it was about five minutes walk to the station. The long curving ramp had nose-to-nose taxis edging up and down and a constant procession of people moving along the broad pavement. I walked up to the station concourse and back a couple of times. No luck. I hovered outside the Blood Donor Clinic for a while, scanning the steady stream of people for a lanky man, of mixed race, with a cap and a dog.
An hour had passed. Maybe I was too early. If JB had somewhere safe and warm to sleep, perhaps he’d stay there well into the afternoon. If yesterday had been a good day, maybe he’d not appear at all today. If I stayed where I was much longer, the Clinic people would take me for a nervous donor and come out to see if I needed a little encouragement to face the needle. I shuffled along a bit to a tool shop. Spent a while looking at the weird and wonderful machines in the window. Ray would be in seventh heaven here. Lathes, saws, chisels. A carpenter’s treasure trove.
