shrivelled and died following the Michael pit disaster in ’67 and the closures that followed the 1984 strike had found a new incarnation as dormitories whose entire idea of community was a pub quiz night. In the village shops you could buy a scented candle but not a pint of milk. The only way you could tell there had ever been a mining community was the scale model of pit winding gear that straddled the point where the private steam railway had once crossed the main road laden with open trucks of coal bound for the railhead at Thornton Junction. Now, the whitewashed miners’ rows looked like an architect’s deliberate choice of what a vernacular village ought to look like. Their history had been overwhelmed by a designer present.
Since her last visit, Newton of Wemyss had spruced itself up. The modest war memorial stood on a triangle of shaven grass in the centre. Wooden troughs of flowers stood around it at perfect intervals. Immaculate single-storey cottages lined the village green, the only break in the low skyline the imposing bulk of the local pub, the Laird o’ Wemyss. It had once been owned collectively by the local community under the Gothenburg system, but the hard times of the eighties had forced it to close. Now it was a destination restaurant, its ‘Scottish Fusion’ cuisine drawing visitors from as far afield as Dundee and Edinburgh and its prices lifting it well out of her budget. Karen wondered how far Mick Prentice would have had to travel for a simple pint of heavy if he’d stayed put in Newton.
She consulted the Mapquest directions she’d printed out and pointed to a road at the apex of the triangle to her driver, DC Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray. ‘You want to go down the lane there,’ she said. ‘Towards the sea. Where the pit used to be.’
They left the village centre behind immediately. Shaggy hedgerows fringed a field of lush green wheat on the right. ‘All this rain, it’s making everything grow like the clappers,’ the Mint said. It had taken him the full twenty-five-minute journey from the office to summon up a comment.
Karen couldn’t be bothered with a conversation about the weather. What was there to say? It had rained all bloody summer so far. Just because it wasn’t raining right this minute didn’t mean it wouldn’t be wet by the end of the day. She looked over to her left where the colliery buildings had once stood. She had a vague memory of offices, pithead baths, a canteen. Now it had been razed to its concrete foundation, weeds forcing through jagged cracks as they reclaimed it. Marooned beyond it was a single untouched miners’ row; eight raddled houses stranded in the middle of nowhere by the demolition of the buildings that had provided the reason for their existence. Beyond them was a thick stand of tall sycamores and beeches, a dense windbreak between the houses and the edge of the cliff that plunged down thirty feet to the coastal path below. ‘That’s where the Lady Charlotte used to be,’ she said.
‘Eh?’ the Mint sounded startled.
‘The pit, Jason.’
‘Oh. Right. Aye. Before my time.’ He peered through the windscreen, making her wonder uneasily if he needed glasses. ‘Which house is it, guv?’
She pointed to the one second from the end. The Mint eased the car round the potholes as carefully as if it had been his own and came to a halt at the end of Jenny Prentice’s path.
In spite of Karen’s phone call setting up the meeting, Jenny took her time answering the door, which gave them plenty of time to examine the cracked concrete flags and the depressing patch of weedy gravel in front of the house. ‘If this was mine,’ the Mint began, then tailed off, as if it was all too much to contemplate.
The woman who answered the door had the air of someone who had spent her days lying down so life could more easily trample over her. Her lank greying hair was tied back haphazardly, strands escaping at both sides. Her skin was lined and puckered, with broken veins mapping her cheeks. She wore a nylon overall that came to mid-thigh over cheap black trousers whose material had gone bobbly. The overall was a shade of lavender found nowhere in nature. Karen’s parents still lived in a street populated by exminers and their kin in unfashionable Methil, but even the most dysfunctional of their neighbours would have taken more trouble with their appearance when they knew they were in for any kind of official visit. Karen didn’t even bother trying to avoid judging Jenny Prentice on her appearance. ‘Good morning, Mrs Prentice,’ she said briskly. ‘I’m DI Pirie. We spoke on the phone. And this is DC Murray.’
Jenny nodded and sniffed. ‘You’d better come in.’
The living room was cramped but clean. The furniture, like the carpet, was unfashionable but not at all shabby. A room for special occasions, Karen thought, and a life where there were few of those.
Jenny waved them towards the sofa and perched on the edge of an armchair opposite. She was clearly not going to offer them any sort of refreshment. ‘So. You’re here because of our Misha. I thought you lot would have something better to do, all the awful things I keep reading about in the newspapers.’
‘A missing husband and father is a pretty awful thing, wouldn’t you say?’ Karen said.
Jenny’s lips tightened, as if she’d felt the burn of indigestion. ‘Depends on the man, Inspector. The kind of guy you run into doing your job, I don’t imagine too many of their wives and kids are that bothered when they get taken away.’
‘You’d be surprised. A lot of their families are pretty devastated. And at least they know where their man is. They don’t have to live with uncertainty.’
‘I didn’t think I was living with uncertainty. I thought I knew damn fine where Mick was until our Misha started raking about trying to find him.’
Karen nodded. ‘You thought he was in Nottingham.’
‘Aye. I thought he’d went scabbing. To be honest, I wasn’t that sorry to see the back of him. But I was bloody livid that he put that label round our necks. I’d rather he was dead than a blackleg, if you really want to know.’ She pointed at Karen. ‘You sound like you’re from round here. You must know what it’s like to get tarred with that brush.’
Karen tipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘All the more galling now that it looks like he didn’t go scabbing after all.’
Jenny looked away. ‘I don’t know that. All I know is that he didn’t go to Nottingham that night with that particular bunch of scabs.’
‘Well, we’re here to try to establish what really happened. My colleague here is going to take some notes, just to make sure I don’t misremember anything you tell me.’ The Mint hastily took out his notebook and flipped it open in a nervous flurry of pages. Maybe Phil had been right about his deficiencies, Karen thought. ‘Now, I need his full name and date of birth.’
‘Michael James Prentice. Born 20th January 1955.’
‘And you were all living here at the time? You and Mick and Misha?’
‘Aye. I’ve lived here all my married life. Never really had a choice in the matter.’
‘Have you got a photo of Mick you could let us have? I know it’s a long time ago, but it could be helpful.’
‘You can put it on the computer and make it older, can’t you?’ Jenny went to the sideboard and opened a drawer.
‘Sometimes it’s possible.’ But too expensive unless there’s a more pressing reason than your grandson’s leukaemia.
Jenny took out an immaculate black leather album and brought it back to the chair. When she opened it, the covers creaked. Even upside down and from the other side of the room, Karen could see it was a wedding album. Jenny quickly turned past the formal wedding shots to a pocket at the back, thickly stuffed with snaps. She pulled out a bundle and flicked through them. She paused at a couple, then finally settled on one. She handed Karen a rectangular picture. It showed a head and shoulders of two young men grinning at the camera, corners of the beer glasses in shot as they toasted the photographer. ‘That’s Mick on the left,’ Jenny said. ‘The good-looking one.’
She wasn’t lying. Mick Prentice had tousled dark blond hair, cut in the approximation of a mullet that George Michael had boasted in his Wham period. Mick