she said. ‘Who’s the other guy?’ A raggedy mop of brown hair, long, bony face, a few faint acne scars pitting the sunken cheeks, lively eyes, a triangular grin like the Joker in the Batman comics. Not a looker like his pal, but something engaging about him all the same.
‘His best pal. Andy Kerr.’
The best pal who killed himself, according to Misha. ‘Misha told me your husband went missing on Friday the fourteenth of December 1984. Is that your recollection?’
‘That’s right. He went out in the morning with his bloody paints and said he’d be back for his tea. That was the last I saw him.’
‘Paints? He was doing a bit of work on the side?’
Jenny made a sound of disdain. ‘As if. Not that we couldn’t have used the money. No, Mick painted watercolours. Can you credit it? Can you imagine anything more bloody useless in the 1984 strike than a miner painting watercolours?’
‘Could he not have sold them?’ the Mint chipped in, leaning forward and looking keen.
‘Who to? Everybody round here was skint and there was no money for him to go someplace else on the off chance.’ Jenny gestured at the wall behind them. ‘He’d have been lucky to get a couple of pounds apiece.’
Karen swivelled round and looked at the three cheaply framed paintings on the wall. West Wemyss, Macduff Castle and the Lady’s Rock. To her untutored eye, they looked vivid and lively. She’d have happily given them house room, though she didn’t know how much she’d have been willing to pay for the privilege back in 1984. ‘So, how did he get into that?’ Karen asked, turning back to face Jenny.
‘He did a class at the Miners’ Welfare the year Misha was born. The teacher said he had a gift for it. Me, I think she said the same to every one of them that was halfway good looking.’
‘But he kept it up?’
‘It got him out of the house. Away from the dirty nappies and the noise.’ Bitterness seemed to come off Jenny Prentice in waves. Curious but heartening that it didn’t seem to have infected her daughter. Maybe that had something to do with the stepfather she’d spoken about. Karen reminded herself to ask about the other man in Jenny’s life, another who seemed notable by his absence.
‘Did he paint much during the strike?’
‘Every day it was fair he was out with his kitbag and his easel. And if it was raining, he was down the caves with his pals from the Preservation Society.’
‘The Wemyss caves, do you mean?’ Karen knew the caves that ran back from the shore deep into the sandstone cliffs between East Wemyss and Buckhaven. She’d played in them a few times as a child, oblivious to their historical significance as a major Pictish site. The local kids had treated them as indoor play areas, which was one of the reasons why the Preservation Society had been set up. Now there were railings closing off the deeper and more dangerous sections of the cave network and amateur historians and archaeologists had preserved them as a playground for adults. ‘Mick was involved with the caves?’
‘Mick was involved in everything. He played football, he painted his pictures, he messed about in the caves, he was up to his eyes in the union. Anything and everything was more important than spending time with his family.’ Jenny crossed one leg over the other and folded her arms across her chest. ‘He said it kept him sane during the strike. I think it just kept him out the road of his responsibilities.’
Karen knew this was fertile soil for her inquiries but she could afford to leave it for later. Jenny’s suppressed anger had stayed put for twenty-two years. It wasn’t about to go anywhere now. There was something much more immediate that interested her. ‘So, during the strike, where did Mick get the money for paints? I don’t know much about art, but I know it costs a few bob for proper paper and paint.’ She couldn’t imagine any striking miner spending money on art supplies when there was no money for food or heating.
‘I don’t want to get anybody into trouble,’ she said.
Yeah, right. ‘It was twenty-three years ago,’ Karen said flatly. ‘I’m really not interested in small-scale contra from the time of the miner’s strike.’
‘One of the art teachers from the high school lived up at Coaltown. He was a wee cripple guy. One leg shorter than the other and a humphy back. Mick used to do his garden for him. The guy paid him in paints.’ She gave a little snort. ‘I said could he not pay him in money or food. But apparently the guy was paying out all his wages to the ex-wife. The paints he could nick from the school.’ She refolded her arms. ‘He’s dead now anyway.’
Karen tried to tamp down her dislike of this woman, so different from the daughter who had beguiled her into this case. ‘So what was it like between you, before Mick disappeared?’
‘I blame the strike. OK, we had our ups and downs. But it was the strike that drove a wedge between us. And I’m not the only woman in this part of the world who could say the same thing.’
Karen knew the truth of that. The terrible privations of the strike had scarred just about every couple she had known back then. Domestic violence had erupted in improbable places; suicide rates had risen; marriages had shattered in the face of implacable poverty. She hadn’t understood it at the time, but she did now. ‘Maybe so. But everybody’s story’s different. I’d like to hear yours.’
Friday 14th December 1984; Newton of Wemyss
‘I’ll be back for my tea,’ Mick Prentice said, slinging the big canvas bag across his body and grabbing the slender package of his folded easel.
‘Tea? What tea? There’s nothing in the house to eat. You need to be out there finding food for your family, not messing about painting the bloody sea for the umpteenth time,’ Jenny shouted, trying to force him to halt on his way out the door.
He turned back, his gaunt face twisted in shame and pain. ‘You think I don’t know that? You think we’re the only ones? You think if I had any idea how to make this better I wouldn’t be doing it? Nobody has any fucking food. Nobody has any fucking money.’ His voice caught in his throat like a sob. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Down the Welfare last night, Sam Thomson said there was talk of a food delivery from the Women Against Pit Closures. If you get yourself down there, they’re supposed to be here about two o’clock.’ It was so cold in the kitchen that his words formed a cloud in front of his lips.
‘More handouts. I can’t remember the last time I actually chose what I was going to cook for the tea.’ Jenny suddenly sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. She looked up at him. ‘Are we ever going to get to the other side of this?’
‘We’ve just got to hold out a bit longer. We’ve come this far. We can win this.’ He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
‘They’re going back, Mick. All the time, they’re going back. It was on the news the other night. More than a quarter of the pits are back working. Whatever Arthur Scargill and the rest of the union executive might say, there’s no way we can win. It’s just a question of how bloody that bitch Thatcher will make the losing.’
He shook his head vehemently. ‘Don’t say that, Jenny. Just because there are a few pockets down south where they’ve caved in. Up here, we’re rock solid. So’s Yorkshire. And South Wales. And we’re the ones that matter.’ His words sounded hollow and there was no conviction in his face. They were, she thought, all beaten. They just didn’t know when to lie down.
‘If you say so,’ she muttered, turning away. She waited till she heard the door close behind him, then slowly got up and put her coat on. She picked up a heavy-duty plastic sack and left the freezing chill of the kitchen for the damp cold of the morning. This was her routine these days. Get up and walk Misha to school. At the school gate, the bairn would be given an apple or an orange, a bag of crisps and a chocolate biscuit by the Friends of the Lady Charlotte, a rag, tag and bobtail bunch of students and public sector workers from Kirkcaldy who made sure none of the kids started