She pulled a lace-trimmed hanky from her bag, wiped her nose and eyes, took a shaky breath. ‘No, I’ve.racked my brains. We’ve no relatives round here, we’re a small family. I’m so worried, it’s just not like him. Will you look for him?’ Her eyes were pleading.
‘Mrs Hobbs, there’s so little to go on. If Martin wants to stay missing, he will.’
‘But you’ll try?’
‘Look, I can ask around a bit. A lot of youngsters drift into Manchester initially…but after a month…If I don’t get any leads in the first couple of days, I really don’t think it would be worth pursuing. You’d be wasting your money.’
‘Thank you.’ The hanky came out again.
‘I need a recent photo.’
‘Yes.’ She fumbled in her bag. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t any good ones. We had a fire you see, last year. The lounge got the worst of it, the albums…’
She handed me two snapshots and a newspaper clipping. Both photographs were outdoor shots, full-length, taken from a distance. In one, a slight dark-haired boy in school uniform stood by a bus-stop; in the other, the same figure, in a waxed jacket, sat at the edge of some water surrounded by fishing tackle.
‘That’s up at Lostock. Rumworth Reservoir,’ she said. ‘He liked it there.’ It was a better shot of the reservoir than it was of Martin.
The newspaper cutting showed a smiling Martin holding up an eight pound carp. It was faded and grainy but it showed his face more clearly than either of the photos. There was an elfin look to him; pointed chin, slight nose, cap of dark hair. His face seemed lit up by that smile.
‘I’ll get copies done of these, then you can have them back.’
‘I brought some money.’ She fumbled with the clasp of her purse. Drew out an envelope. Cash. A thousand pounds.
‘This is far too much,’ I protested.
We wrangled for a while. She insisted I keep the money and, if I did end up resigning after two or three days, I could send her the difference. Oh, well. It’d be a pleasant surprise for the assistant bank manager, with whom I had such a lively exchange of letters.
I made a note of Mrs Hobbs’ phone number and told her I’d be in touch early the following week, unless I had any news before then. She thanked me about twenty times on the way to the door. I began to wonder whether she might have been Martin’s problem, finding it hard to let him go, not knowing how to give him the space to grow up and away from her. Perhaps. But, for now, my task was to find out where he’d gone, not why he’d left.
