‘Last Sunday. She was up early, for once, Tracy don’t get up in the mornings much, but she had a lunch date, she was all dolled up for it, must have took her hours just to do her make-up, and she woke me up to borrow a few quid for fares, selfish cow, although she knew I’d been out late on the Saturday night. I only had a ten-quid note, so she took that, and promised to give it back that evening. Said she would get it off Sean.’
‘Sean?’
‘Finnigan. Tracy’s been going with him for a month or two.’
‘You’re sure of that? Have you seen them together? You’ve met him?’
‘
Once or twice he come here to pick her up. Not my type, mind. Oh, looks good, got some great clothes – but I like older men, men with a bit of character.’ She fluttered her lashes in Neil’s direction but he was not flattered. He wasn’t even middle-aged yet – what did she mean, older men? ‘But he’s loaded, his dad runs some business, computers, Tracy said, and Sean’s his only kid.’
‘Was it Sean she was meeting for lunch?’
‘Yeah, or why would she say he’d give her a few quid when she asked him? Said he owed her. But she never come back and I never got my money, did I?’
‘What did she mean, he owed her?’
‘How the hell do I know? Tracy said he was going to have to pay for his fun, whatever that meant. She’s nice enough, but she can be a tough little cow. Needs to be, like all of us. The world’s always trying to get us, we have to be tough to survive.’
‘What about her family? Have you contacted them?’
‘She ain’t got a family. There’s her dad, but he’s in a home you can’t get any sense out of him, Tracy says. He doesn’t know who he is, let alone who you are. Nobody’s at home, OK?’
‘And her mother?’
‘Died of cancer while we was at school. Real cut up, Tracy was. Loved her mum. I guess that toughened her up. The social took her away from her dad; he tried it on with her. He was losing it, even then.’
‘Have you got a photo of Tracy? What’s her full name?’
‘There’s this picture of her and me at Brighton a month ago, that suit you?’
They looked very similar, much the same height and make-up, with dyed blonde hair and bright, knowing, eyes. They wore the same sort of clothes, too. Tracy was wearing a lacy top through which you could catch glimpses of her smooth, pale skin; a straw hat with the words Kiss Me Quick printed around a red satin ribbon.
The lacy blouse gave her sexiness; the cheap hat made her look like a schoolgirl; very young and pathetic, perhaps because, mused Neil, the hindsight of suspecting she was dead altered the way you thought of her.
‘Her name’s Tracy Morgan, she said her family came from Wales,’ said Delphine. ‘I’ve known her since school. We both lived around here all our lives.’
He glanced out of the window at the ugly greyness of the streets. A life lived here must be depressing.
‘Anything else you can tell me about her, or the young man she was seeing?’
‘Yeah. She was too good for him, and you can quote me. She was OK, was Tracy. D’you think something’s happened to her? Or has she just gone off with her bloke?’
‘At the moment, I’ve no idea.’
The next time Miranda woke up she was in bed in a quiet, softly lit hospital ward. There was a bed on either side of her, both occupied, the women in them sleeping, the bedcovers pulled up to their necks. There were another three occupied beds across an expanse of polished wooden flooring. The windows had beige blinds drawn down over them. It was night, she realised. Somewhere somebody coughed. Quiet, steady footsteps came from outside.
She had spent so much time in hospital three years ago that this was all very familiar. Almost comforting. In here, she felt safe.
The pain she had been in had diminished, ebbed away. She felt calm and heavy. Miranda knew what that meant. They had drugged her. She recognised this lethargic state, the wooliness inside her head. She was unworried, unafraid, because she was tranquillised.
She carefully moved to see what injuries she had. Her right leg was in plaster, her right arm was bandaged, and there were bandages on her head.
The right must have been the side of her body that was hit by the car. Her left side seemed quite undamaged. She could move her left arm and leg freely, without pain, tentatively fingering the bandages on the other side of her body, investigating what had happened to her.
She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even dying, she realised. The angel of death had missed again.
At least this time she had not woken up to find him in the room with her, waiting for her to die.