Here it is!’ I pounced on the small rectangular piece of cardboard among the debris. ‘Alderley Edge Cricket Club. Junior member.’
‘Junior member?’
‘It’s expired. But that’s where he’s from. Bet you.’
‘Alderley Edge? Was that where Beckham lived?’
‘Google it,’ I said, chucking her phone back at her.
Jo tapped the screen. ‘“Alderley Edge”,’ she read. ‘“A village and civil parish in Cheshire – fourteen miles south of Manchester”.’
‘Carly said a village.’ We were on the right track, I could feel it.
Jo frowned. ‘So we’re going to drive around Alderley Edge looking for Jack’s dad?’
‘He’s got a car dealership. He wants people to find him.’
‘You don’t know his business is in Alderley Edge.’
‘Any better ideas?’
Jo pulled a face. ‘We should tidy this lot away again.’
‘Let’s just get there.’
‘Wild fecking goose chase.’
‘Worth a shot,’ I said.
While Jo scooped the crap back into the bin liners, I paced the office, stopping only to scribble a few more questions on my notepad. Even if we didn’t find Jack’s dad, I wanted to see a bit of where Jack was from, get some of the background – and not just through the eyes of his stepmother. What does a stepmother know? Even assuming Susan Wilkins was who she said she was.
One fact remained. Jack had done a runner and I suppose the thought was in my mind that he might have gone home. We reach for the past in times of trouble, it’s instinctive. The same way I still think about my mother anytime there’s a success or a failure. No matter she’s been dead four years. No matter that even when she was alive, she’d be too wrapped up in her own misery to take any notice of me, or my life. It’s in all our bones. We want someone to share the highs and lows with.
We were on the road less than twenty minutes later. Jo stashed the rounders bat on the back seat and then climbed behind the steering wheel. I can drive, but I’m not a natural. I’m more your wing pilot – roll cigarettes, read maps, watch out for signs, that kind of thing.
The clock on the dashboard said twenty to eleven as we arrived in Alderley Edge. It was the first day of the year that felt like it had any warmth to it, and I felt like I was coming out of hibernation – like I was waking up. It was obvious, we needed to come to the beginning to work out what had happened at the end.
Alderley Edge is posh. Wide verges, houses set acres apart from each other. Doesn’t fool me though. Life is never like the chocolate box, no matter how much cash you have.
‘So,’ said Jo, as we drove past the village green for the second time. ‘What’s the plan?’
‘The newsagents.’
The man behind the counter couldn’t have been more snooty if he tried. He took one look at me and wouldn’t give an inch, no matter how much I tried to persuade him I was a professional. It struck me again that we needed proper ID. A business card wasn’t enough. I gave up and went back to the car.
‘Not keen to lend a hand?’ said Jo.
‘We’ll have to go door to door,’ I said. ‘A place this small, someone’s got to know.’
It was almost eleven o’clock and it appeared most residents of Alderley Edge did stuff on Saturday mornings. There was no answer at the first four houses we tried. A lanky streak of a teenager answered the fifth door we knocked on, but didn’t seem to know his own name, let alone anything about Jack Wilkins.
We marched up and down the drives of the next dozen or so houses, encountering hostility at every turn. One woman shooed us off the drive with a broom. The only person who was anything approaching polite was a harassed-looking young woman who I guessed was the nanny. She invited us in for a cup of tea, which I took as a sign she was desperate for adult company. I didn’t blame her – I could hear the wail of at least two children in the background.
‘This could take all day,’ said Jo, as we trudged back down a rhododendron-lined drive towards the village centre.
When a man who must have been 90 opened the next door we knocked at, I was all for packing up and going home. He was wearing a brown dressing gown that looked like it was made out of felt, rope like icing piped round the edges.
‘We’re looking for Mr Wilkins?’ said Jo. ‘We believe you might know him?’
‘You’ll have to speak up,’ he said.
‘Mr Wilkins,’ I said, raising my voice. ‘Owns a car dealership somewhere around here.’
‘Or Manchester way,’ Jo muttered under her breath.
‘What about him?’
‘You know him?’
‘I know everyone.’
My heart lifted, and I couldn’t resist turning to Jo and smiling.
‘Pardon?’ said the old man.
I faced him. ‘Do you know where his business is?’
‘What business?’
‘Mr Wilkins’s,’ I added, my throat feeling the strain.
‘You’d better come in. Don’t want everyone staring.’
We followed him in to the strangest house I’d ever been in to. On the one hand, it was probably the wealthiest house I’d ever been inside, but it was also the dirtiest. And believe me, I’ve been in dirty houses. Antique furniture sagged under the weight of piles of books, papers, dust, tins of opened cat food, the tin lids still attached but peeled open. Ashtrays, empty bottles of whisky, wine. Bowls that may have once upon a time contained fruit now contained light bulbs, rotten vegetables, cans of WD40.
‘Sit yourselves down. Don’t get many visitors these days.’
He lifted a fat ginger cat from one of the kitchen chairs and dropped it to the floor. It hissed at me, before finding itself a corner on a pile of newspapers.
‘So what do you girls want? Tea, wine, whisky?’
‘Tea, for me,’ I said. I glanced at the washing-up next to the sink. ‘I’ll make it.’ It would save me the problem of deciding where to sit seeing as how Jo had grabbed the chair the cat had vacated.
The sink was one of those white pottery ones that are square and fashionable now, but this one was probably from the first time around. I tried to organize some kind of system, stacking as
