‘Is it always kept locked?’ asked Meg.
‘Yes,’ said Richards. As he spoke, the safe door swung forwards. ‘Well, not always,’ he conceded.
‘And your front door?’
‘This isn’t a police state, you know. Folk don’t need to keep their doors locked.’
It would have been fairly easy to get a key then, thought Meg. Someone would only have to open the unlocked door and reach round for the safe.
‘Richards,’ said Miss Browning, warningly.
‘Do the girls ever come here?’ asked Meg, trying to keep any note of accusation out of her voice.
‘It’s out of bounds,’ said Richards, ‘but they come with messages sometimes.’
‘Did Rhonda Miles ever come here?’
‘She might have done. Yes, she came once because her bicycle had a puncture.’
‘Richards does all the repair work,’ said Miss Browning, ‘and he helps prepare the girls for their cycling proficiency badge.’
So it obviously wasn’t unknown for pupils to visit the caretaker’s cottage, thought Meg.
‘Are the girls allowed to cycle?’ she asked.
‘In the school grounds,’ said Miss Browning. ‘And Miss Jones, the games mistress, takes them out on rides sometimes. They go up to Devil’s Dyke. Very good exercise.’
‘Did Rhonda know where the keys were kept?’ asked Meg.
‘I couldn’t say.’ Miss Browning was regaining some of her composure—and her authority.
But Richards said, ‘She did know because she saw me get the keys to the bike shed. She made a joke about me being the Keeper of the Keys, like in the Charlie Chan book.’
So Rhonda read detective stories, thought Meg. And, by the sound of it, so did Richards.
‘We need to take the hat back to the police station,’ she said.
‘Could she have left it there on purpose?’ asked Superintendent Stephens. ‘It seems so obvious.’
Meg felt rather annoyed. The hat was her clue, the first real clue they had, and now the super was sneering at it. Of course, DI Willis hastened to agree with his boss.
‘That’s what I thought. Almost as if was left there for us to find.’
The hat was sitting in the middle of the incident table. Meg had been careful to handle it with her gloves on. The super had an obsession about not touching evidence. He liked to dust everything for fingerprints and for other, less obvious, evidence. So far Rhonda’s hat had yielded a collection of red hairs which were also on the table in a see-through bag. ‘One day,’ the super said, ‘we’ll be able to identify people from a single hair.’ This was why some people called him eccentric.
‘Why would someone leave the hat for us to find?’ said Meg, aware that she was sounding truculent.
‘Maybe it was Rhonda herself,’ said the super, ‘trying to put us off the scent. She placed the hat there so that we’d think she’d left via the tunnel.’
‘Why though?’ said Meg. ‘I mean, Rhonda must have planned her escape. She stole the keys from the caretaker. That wouldn’t have been so difficult though. The safe was by his front door and he admitted that it wasn’t always kept locked. But, having gone to all that trouble, why leave a clue?’
The DI made a noise indicating that she should be quiet and stop answering her superiors back but the super just said, mildly, ‘That’s a point. But it’s hard to see how the hat came off by accident. It’s quite large and there’s a neck strap to secure it.’
‘You never do up the neck strap,’ Meg informed him, although Fitzherbert hadn’t run to school hats, or indeed a uniform of any kind. ‘And she could have been carrying it, not wearing it.’
‘Or she could have been in a struggle,’ said Danny Black, perhaps emboldened by Meg’s example to speak up. Usually PCs weren’t invited to the incident meetings but, as they had found the evidence, an exception had been made. To Meg’s annoyance, everyone took Danny’s suggestion more seriously than they had taken her objections.
‘That’s certainly possible,’ said the super, looking concerned. ‘There have been no recorded sightings of Rhonda although we’re keeping a close watch on the Bobby Hambro fans outside his hotel. I spoke to Mr Hambro today and he couldn’t recall ever having seen a girl of Rhonda’s description.’
Meg would have loved to have listened in to the conversation between Superintendent Stephens and Bobby Hambro, Hollywood idol. She wasn’t a Hambro fan herself. She was a Beatles girl.
‘There’s another line I’d like us to explore,’ the super was saying. He took two newspaper cuttings from his briefcase and pinned them on the board. Meg craned her neck to see. She was at the back of the room but luckily she could see over the men’s heads. One showed a group of nurses, the other a mod girl standing by a Vespa.
‘Louise Dawkins,’ said Superintendent Stephens, pointing to one of the nurses, ‘and Sara Henratty. Both went missing over the last few weeks. Both left notes.’
‘We think there might be a connection,’ said DI Willis. He’d clearly been briefed beforehand but he still sounded rather dubious. To be fair, though, he sounded dubious about most things. ‘All three girls are young. Louise is nineteen, Sara and Rhonda sixteen. They all disappeared, leaving notes saying not to follow them. Louise and Sara haven’t been seen since.’
‘There aren’t many similarities,’ said DS Brendan O’Neill, a large man famous in the station for his way with a billiard cue and with suspects. Rumour had it that he succeeded with the latter mainly by beating confessions out of them. He had always been friendly to Meg, probably because they were both Irish, but she was still slightly scared of him. ‘I mean,’ O’Neill went on, ‘that girl’s coloured and the other one’s a mod. Rhonda was a nice girl, she came from a good family.’
‘All three have names,’ said the super, ‘and all three are probably nice girls. Louise was a trainee nurse. She said in her note that she was going back to her family in the West Indies but, according to her friends, she didn’t have any close relations left there. Sara was in foster care. She said she was going off with a boyfriend and no one bothered to check. It’s true that Rhonda came from a different background. She was a pupil at an exclusive boarding school. Her disappearance was never going to go unnoticed. But three young women vanishing in Brighton over about six weeks. I think we should entertain the hypothesis that there’s a link.’
Entertain the hypothesis. Would the super never learn? O’Neill looked baffled and rather angry. Danny turned to Meg and made a face, eyes crossed hideously.
‘Let’s get going,’ said DI Willis. ‘DS O’Neill and DS Barker.’ Charlie ‘Chubby’ Barker, O’Neill’s long-time partner, a lugubrious man who, despite his nickname, was extremely thin. ‘You follow up on Louise and Sara. See if there’s anything suspicious in their disappearances. Also check the undercliff walk. See if there were any sightings of a red-haired girl on Monday night or early on Tuesday morning. WPC Connolly.’ Meg jumped. She hadn’t expected to be given a role. She’d thought that she would be back to traffic duty and finding lost dogs. She sat up straighter. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘I want you to go up to London and talk to the Bobby Hambro fans.’
‘Talk to them?’
‘Yes.’ The DI’s ears were going red again. ‘I want you to mingle with them. Undercover. In plain clothes.’
‘You’ll have to wear a miniskirt, Meg,’ said Danny.
Meg didn’t mind. She even didn’t mind all the sniggering in the room at the thought of her legs being exposed. She was going undercover. Like a real detective.
Nine
Max was feeling uncomfortable. It wasn’t just that he was having a rare evening alone with his adult daughter, or that she was cooking him something that smelt as if it was already burnt, it was also that he was sitting on what was closer to a medieval instrument of torture than an armchair. He’d chosen the chair, an egg-shaped thing with an orange corduroy cushion in the middle, because the only other alternatives appeared to be beanbags
or a sofa that was already occupied by a Siamese cat. Ruby was obviously proud of her flat, which was in a 1930s mansion block, just off Kensington Church Street. She had shown him round proudly: white walls, op-art pictures, a bed covered in zebra stripes, a bathroom with pink furnishings, an open-plan kitchen/diner with bar stools and an American-style fridge.
‘It’s been in Vogue,’ she told him, leafing through the magazines on the glass coffee table until she found one that opened easily at a spread entitled ‘Ruby Magic at Home’, showing Ruby curled up in the egg chair, and holding a frying pan in the kitchen whilst wearing a miniskirt and white knee-length boots.
‘It’s great,’ said Max. ‘Very modern.’
‘I suppose you’re used to your mansion in Beverly Hills,’ said Ruby, her voice hardening.
‘Of course not,’ said Max. But, in truth, he was, rather. He was used to space and light and seeing blue sky out of the window, rather than the flats opposite. He was used to swimming forty lengths before breakfast and having a Spanish chef who made him pancakes with blueberries and fresh cream. Ruby’s flat was described in Vogue as ‘a with-it retreat for our favourite It Girl’ but it seemed cramped and uncomfortable to Max. Or maybe that was just because his back seemed to have gone into spasm.
Ruby was in the kitchen now, clattering pans and occasionally uttering small exclamations of surprise and dismay. Max had offered to take her to a restaurant, to the Hungaria or the Ritz, but she had insisted on cooking for him at her flat. Now, he wondered why. Despite the photograph in Vogue, he got the impression that Ruby didn’t venture into the kitchen very often.
‘Ready!’ she called. The cat, who was called Cleopatra, stretched and looked at Max out of insolent blue eyes. Max liked cats but this one seemed a particularly aloof specimen who had responded to Max’s initial overtures of friendship with a sharp, almost certainly admonitory, meow. Max and Cleopatra proceeded into the kitchen where Ruby had laid the round table with a red tablecloth and a candle in a Chianti bottle. She placed a plate in front of Max. It contained a pork chop with a pineapple ring on it surrounded by an unknown gloopy substance.
‘Ratatouille,’ she said. ‘It comes out of a tin but it’s apparently just as good as the real thing.’
Cleopatra was meowing impatiently and Ruby opened a different tin for her. Max found himself looking at its contents almost with envy. He’d brought a bottle of Barolo and opened it now, pouring them both generous glasses. He had a feeling that he would need it if he was going to be able to eat anything.
The chop and the pineapple were both slightly burnt but the pineapple had a cloying sweetness that contrasted oddly with the acidity of the ratatouille. Max took a swig of wine.
‘This is delicious,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘It tastes a bit strange,’ said Ruby dispassionately. ‘Everything I cook ends up tasting strange.’
‘Do you cook often?’
‘No.’ She smiled at him, her old grin, a mixture of bonhomie and challenge. ‘Usually men take me out to dinner.’
‘I can imagine.’
Max knew about Ruby’s boyfriends. They even sometimes appeared in the American gossip magazines that were Lydia’s main source of reading material: pop stars, racing drivers, the occasional minor royal and, of course, the ever-present Joe Passolini. But Max had no idea why Ruby was thirty-four (how could he have a daughter in her thirties?) and still unmarried. She was rich and successful and as beautiful as ever. Possibly more beautiful now than she had been at twenty, thinner and more stylish, her glossy black hair just reaching her chin, her brown eyes enhanced with mascara and dark eyeliner.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he said, manfully continuing to eat his chop. Ruby had pushed her plate away, almost untouched.
‘It’s been a long time,’ said Ruby. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘No,’ said Max. He was surprised how many people in England still smoked. Lydia thought that tobacco was poison and made him take his cigars out into the garden.
He’d seen Ruby at his father’s funeral. She’d been fond of the old monster and seemed genuinely sad at his death. Then she’d visited them in LA with mixed success. Ruby had got on well with the children but he could see that Lydia was not overjoyed by the appearance of a stepdaughter who was almost her own age and was, what’s more, a successful performer in her own right. He’d made a fuss of Ruby and had shown her the sights of Hollywood but she’d seemed determined to be unimpressed. ‘It reminds me of the Blackpool illuminations,’ she’d said, when he’d taken her to see the famous sign in the hills.
‘Is there a man at the moment?’ he asked, as she blew out smoke. He fully expected Ruby to tell him to mind his own business but she just gave him the smile again and said, ‘Yes, there is, as a matter of fact, but I’m keeping him secret for the moment.’
‘How’s the show going?’ he said. ‘Joe said that ratings were higher than ever.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘People still seem to love Ruby Magic.’ The show, a comedy drama about a magician who used her powers to extricate her from the complications of her personal life, had been on the BBC for six years now. Ruby was wonderful in it, funny and clever and sometimes unexpectedly moving, but, even so, Max wondered whether it was reaching the end of its natural life. There were only so many romantic mishaps a girl magician could have.
‘It was good to see Edgar and Emma again at Uncle Stan’s funeral,’ Ruby said now. ‘I’d forgotten that I actually liked her.’
Ruby had once been engaged to Edgar and, whilst Max had never thought that they were well-suited, he sometimes wondered whether Ruby had been more upset at their break-up than she admitted. He thought that she had been hurt at the speed with which Edgar had married Emma afterwards. He had certainly never heard her speak warmly about Emma before.
‘She’s an interesting woman,’ he said, rather cautiously. ‘I wonder if she finds life as a wife and mother completely fulfilling.’
‘I would say she was bored to tears,’ said Ruby.
‘I’m having dinner with them tomorrow,’ said Max. ‘I’ll ask her.’
‘I bet you don’t,’ said Ruby. ‘Oh, stop pretending to eat that, Max. It’s absolutely disgusting. I’ve got some cheese and biscuits somewhere.’
After that, the evening was cosier. They took the cheese and biscuits, and the rest of the wine, into the sitting room and Ruby made Cleopatra move so that they could have the sofa. They talked about acting and magic and the Beatles’ recent trip to America.
‘I met them once,’ said Ruby. ‘They were nice. Quite shy actually.’
‘They’re clever songwriters,’ said Max. ‘But all this hysteria about pop stars now makes me rather nervous. Strange things happen when people become hysterical. I remember that in the war.’
‘It’s like stage magic,’ said Ruby. ‘People will see what they want to see.’
Max had already decided not to go back to Brighton that night. He’d go to the Strand Palace where they always kept a room for him. It was nearly midnight but he didn’t want to break up the evening. But then the telephone rang and Ruby disappeared for a long time. When she came back, she seemed rather keen for him to leave, mentioning last trains and the difficulties of finding taxis on Kensington High Street. Max took the hint. He wondered if the mysterious man was coming round. The thought made him rather uneasy.
Ten
Meg emerged from Green Park tube station feeling unpleasantly conscious of the fact that the people behind her could see up her skirt. She’d had to borrow it from her younger sister Aisling and, whilst all the Connollys were tall, Aisling was at least three inches shorter than Meg. The pleated skirt that came just above Aisling’s knees was mid-thigh on Meg and the waistband was uncomfortably tight. She’d teamed it with a chunky jumper, knee-length boots and a crocheted hat that she’d made herself. The outfit had looked passable in her mirror that morning but as soon as she reached London, she saw that it was all wrong. Girls wore shift dresses with li
ttle white collars, pale tights and buckled shoes. Boots were white, not brown with rubber soles. No one wore a jumper, unless it was a little twinset. The hat was OK but she was conscious that her hair, cut short so that it wouldn’t have to be tied back at work, wasn’t the shiny waterfall that cascaded down the backs of the beauties sauntering along Piccadilly. And—dear God!—why were all the women so small and thin? What had they done with everyone over five ten? Locked them up in the Tower?
At least she looked awkward so she’d probably fit in with the Bobby Soxers. They were gathered outside the hotel, about fifteen of them, teenagers by the look of them. Why weren’t they in school? It was eleven o’clock on a Thursday morning. Shouldn’t they be doing double French, or something equally tedious? She approached two girls who were reading a magazine, shiny heads close together, mousy and blonde.
‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Has he come out yet?’
The girls looked at her. They weren’t hostile exactly but they were wary, suspecting an outsider in their midst.
‘He’s not due out until midday,’ said the blonde girl. ‘He’s going into the country to look at locations for Golden Heart.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The doorman told us,’ said Mousy Hair. ‘It’s Pat today. He’s nice. Not like Alan.’
‘No, Alan’s horrible,’ said the other girl. ‘He called us silly little girls the other day.’
‘What a cheek,’ said Meg. ‘Well, he can’t call me little.’ She thought she’d better get the height thing out of the way early on. She was bending her knees slightly but she still towered over the other girls.
‘No,’ said Blondie. ‘How old are you anyway?’
‘Eighteen,’ said Meg promptly. ‘Same as Bobby.’
‘I read somewhere that he’s twenty-five,’ said Mouse.
‘That’s a bloody lie,’ said Blondie. She looked rather defiantly at Meg, perhaps expecting her to be shocked at such language.
Two other girls came over; they looked older and more confident, wearing leather jackets and capri pants.
Now You See Them Page 6