The Sleeping and the Dead Read Free Page B

impossible to let the investigation go. He thought he was as bad as the macho colleagues who bragged of their nights without sleep in pursuit of
their prey. Still with his glass in his hand he read through his shortlist of candidates again, hoping to pick up on some minute detail which would point him to the man he was looking for.
    He judged them, just as a betting man would pick a horse from a racing paper, using a mixture of fact, experience and superstition. There were three. After those he had picked a dozen or so more
to follow up if nothing came of the first group. He set the three sheets before him in alphabetical order and read them again.
    The first was Alan Brownscombe, the boy who could swim like a fish. His parents still lived in Cranford. They came originally from the West Country and had planned on moving back there when they
retired, but even after retirement they had stayed where they were – ‘otherwise how would Alan know where to find us?’
    Porteous had spoken to the mother. She had worked as a dinner lady in Cranwell Village First School. The father had worked for British Gas and taken a redundancy package when the company was
privatized. Mrs Brownscombe could remember exactly what happened when Alan disappeared. She had the story pat, word for word, like a favourite bedtime tale repeated over and over to a child. He was
the eldest of three, a bright boy, and he’d gone to Leeds University to read electrical engineering. He’d never been away from home before. Perhaps he was homesick. Perhaps the course
was more demanding than he’d expected. At any rate when she managed to get through to him on the phone she sensed he was unhappy. It was Easter when he went missing. He was nineteen. It was
1978, a bit outside Porteous’s preferred time-scale but not by much. Alan had come home for the holidays and managed to get a job on the caravan site by the lake, cleaning the vans before the
start of the season, doing small repairs. One day he set off for work and never arrived. He didn’t take anything with him other than the packet of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches she’d
made up for his lunch. So far as they knew he had no money. He didn’t return to university and they never saw him again.
    ‘You say he was unhappy,’ Porteous had said. The woman’s West Country accent was preserved intact. If they could tell her what happened to her son, even if he were dead,
she’d feel she could move home. He’d wanted to help her. ‘Could he have been clinically depressed?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘It wasn’t something you thought of then. Not with a nineteen-year-old lad. And he was home with us. We’d not have sent him
back if he didn’t want to go, whatever sort of noises his father was making.’
    The height and the build fitted the body in the lake. She gave Porteous the name of Alan’s dentist without asking why he wanted to know.
    Michael Grey was reported missing only after his foster parents had died and the executors of their wills had tried to trace him. They’d left him the small house where they’d been
living. He’d have been twenty-two at the time, but when a firm of solicitors tried to track him down they discovered that no one had seen him since he was eighteen. That would have been in
1972. It was a peculiar case but Porteous tried not to read too much into it. Social Services seemed not to feel too much responsibility for kids in care once they were sixteen. They drifted in a
twilight world of hard-to-let flats, hostels and mates’ floors. And if the next of kin had been named as one of the executors presumably there wouldn’t have been much incentive to trace
the boy. Perhaps they would have received the profit from the house in his absence. The description was vague. Porteous had the feeling that the person reporting Michael as missing had never seen
him. Nothing ruled him out from being the dead boy in the lake, but there was nothing to suggest it.