Paul said incredulously, ‘Out? I saw the chalk come up.’
‘Just dust. It was a foot out.’
‘Thirty-forty. Louise served, Sally returned it near to the baseline, Paul hit a stylish forehand which Ray moved to play at, then checked himself. ‘Out,’ he called. ‘Game. And set.’
Paul, at the back of the court, stood with hands on hips, then came up and spoke to Louise. They both laughed.
‘What’s the joke?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all.’
‘There must have been, you were both laughing. Let me in on it.’ Ray too had now come up to the net. ‘Louise.’
‘Nothing. Paul just said–’
‘Yes?’
She looked at Paul, who said, ‘It was just a casual remark. A joke.’
Ray’s nutty face looked as if it were being screwed by a vice. ‘I should like to know what you said.’
Before Paul could answer, Louise spoke. She had a delicate little-girl voice. ‘Paul said if you were taking one of those drunkenness tests where you have to walk along a white line you wouldn’t pass it, because you wouldn’t be able to see where the white line was. I thought it was rather funny. I mean, you know that last shot was in.’
Ray glared at her, then walked off the court. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ Paul said mildly.
‘But it was in. Wasn’t it, Sally?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
Paul put an arm round each of them. ‘Let’s just simmer down, shall we?’
The girls were drinking gin and tonic and Paul had a glass of beer, when Ray came into the bar. When Paul asked what he was drinking he looked deliberately at him. ‘I don’t drink with people who say I’ve cheated. Or with little bitches who try to make trouble.’
He turned and walked out. He had not spoken loudly, but the barman had heard and so had Peter Ponsonby, who was standing only a couple of feet away. Peter’s cherub cheeks trembled with indignation. ‘Such rudeness. It’s intolerable. I do apologise to you both. I shall see that the Committee hears about it.’
Paul said it was just a stupid joke that had been misunderstood, and Louise asked if she could have another drink. Sally went home soon afterwards. When she got home she told her parents what had happened. She was campaigning for a flat in London which she would share with a girl friend, but so far her father had refused to stump up any money, saying that she could finish her trainee management course first. He said now that Paul seemed to have stepped out of line, and she replied that the club was so fantastically dull that anything which livened it up was welcome. She went on to say that it was no worse than the rest of Rawley. Then she went upstairs, slammed the door of her bedroom, and played the latest James Taylor record much too loudly.
Paul and Louise stayed drinking and playing darts until ten o’clock. He was in good form at darts too, and after he had ended one game with a double, she hugged him closely. Then he drove her home, and kissed her good night outside her house. She kissed him back, then broke away. He sat with his fingers tapping the steering wheel.
‘I’m too old, is that it? Or is it Ray?’
‘Not really. I’m finished with him.’
‘You’ve got somebody else?’
‘Could be,’ she said with devastating coyness. ‘Could be I shan’t be in Rawley for ever. I mean, it’s dead, isn’t it? For young people.’
She was not particularly attractive but the words excited him, with the implication that they belonged to different worlds. He tried to drag her towards him with one arm and to put his other hand up her skirt. She pulled away, got out of the car and slammed the door. He watched her retreating back, started the car and went home.
That Sunday Paul and Alice went to dinner with her parents, the Parkinsons, who lived only a few miles away. When Paul had mentioned this as an inducement for going to live in Rawley, Alice was sharp.
‘I shouldn’t have thought you’d have wanted to see them more than twice a year. You know you hate them. And they don’t love you.’
‘I get on perfectly well with your father.’ Alice’s father had been a brigadier, and although his unit had been the Pay Corps and he was now retired, he still used the title. Her mother had spotted at once that Paul was not out of the top drawer, and had disapproved of him accordingly. There was a time when he had christened them the brigadier and his lady, and she had found it funny, but that was long ago.
‘You know Daddy never talks about anything but the weather.’
‘The trouble is that when you’re with them you become a different person.’
‘How would you know what sort of person I am? You’ve never tried to find out.’
He did not reply. This was as near as they ever got to quarrelling.
When they arrived the brigadier was in the garden prodding away with a hoe. He kissed his daughter, said to his son-in-law, ‘Hallo, young shaver,’ and added, ‘Need rain. Very dry.’
In the house Norah, the brigadier’s lady, met them with a jangle of bracelets, the offer of an enamelled cheek, a glass of very dry sherry. At dinner she spoke of the servant problem. Alice, in tune with her mother, said that it was hopeless to try to get anybody in Rawley, they were all employed at the Timbals factory.
‘What this country needs is a sharp dose of unemployment. It would bring people to their senses.’
The brigadier liked, as he said, to get his head down over his food, but now he lifted it. ‘Don’t suppose you’d want too much of that, eh, Paul? Expect you get it, though. Seasonal work and all that.’
‘We try to avoid seasonal employment as much as we can. After all, it’s my job to keep people happy. They aren’t happy if they know they may be out of work next month.’ He felt Norah’s eyes upon him. Was he using the wrong tools?
‘A personnel man, I’ve always thought that was a strange occupation,’ she said. ‘It’s what your army units used to be called, personnel.’ With no change of tone she said to Paul, ‘I think you need another knife.’
It was true. He had used a knife instead of a spoon for the melon.
The evening went on like that. When he drove back Alice said. ‘You hated every minute. Why did you say we should go?’
‘You were no help. You just echoed your mother.’
‘We’re not compatible,’ she said softly into the darkness of the car. She imagined that dark young man at her side.
Chapter Nine
Departure of an Odd Girl
On 22 June, a Wednesday, Plender was idly going round an exhibition in the Market Square called Crime Prevention – It’s Up To You. The exhibition was a travelling one, staffed by some London men who managed not to smile when Plender said he was from Rawley CID and was hoping to find out something new about catching villains. He was standing in front of an exhibit full of flashing differently-coloured lights, which was meant to show the chain of communications between crime squads, when he heard his name called. He turned and saw Ray Gordon of the Rawley Enquirer. Plender grinned. ‘Don’t quote me, but I’m trying to learn a bit about my trade.’
‘What’s it worth to say you weren’t here?’
‘I’ll buy you a beer, if that’s what you mean. You can tell me the latest dirt.’
‘Let me buy you one. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of giving you a ring.’
‘To report a crime?’
‘Hope not.’ Plender thought of Gordon as a man with plenty of nerve, but in the saloon bar of the Red Lion he seemed nervous. ‘A girl I know has disappeared. Her parents asked me not to say anything about it, but still.’
‘When?’
‘Went out on Monday evening, didn’t come back.’
‘Your girl-friend, was she? Had a row with her, anything like that?’
‘She wasn’t my girl-friend. I’ve taken her out a couple of times, but nothing serious. And we did have a bit of a squabble last Saturday at the tennis club. She was playing with a conceited bastard called Vane, just come to live here, and we had a few words. Nothin
g really. I hadn’t seen her since. Her mother gave me a call yesterday, to see if I’d heard from her.’
‘So she lives at home. How old?’
‘Nearly nineteen.’
‘Doing a bit of cradle-snatching, weren’t you?’
Ray’s embarrassment deepened. ‘Sounds like that, I dare say, but she could look after herself. Well, in a way. She didn’t exactly want sex, she wanted adventure, but she was afraid too, if you know what I mean. The tennis club wasn’t her line, much too respectable and unexciting, but she’d have been frightened to go out for anything else. She was an odd girl, I suppose.’
‘Have you made her?’
‘None of your bloody business.’
Plender said pacifically, ‘I’m just trying to find out whether she slept around.’
‘I’m sure she didn’t. She told me she’d slept with a boy at some pop festival last year, but my guess would be that was about it. No, I didn’t make her.’
Plender ordered another beer. ‘Know any details? I mean, where she was going on Monday night, that kind of thing? No, all right, where do the parents live?’
‘Eighty Woodside Place. Look, if you’re going round to see them, try to forget I told you about this, will you? They won’t like it.’
‘What do you expect me to say, cock, that I’m calling at every house down their road to find out how many daughters are missing? What’s she doing, just being a home body?’
‘Left school, got a place at some university up north, couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to take it up.’ He brooded on his beer. ‘I suppose you could say she was filling in time waiting for something to happen.’
‘A lot of us are doing that.’
Plender went round to Woodside Place, which was a large estate of neat identical modern houses built in the form of a letter E. It took him some time to find number eighty. The door bell had a two-tone chime.
The small woman who opened the door had a dumpling face and boot-button eyes which flared with fear or anxiety when Plender gave his name. She ushered him in quickly, as though he were a rent collector. in the back room a tall man with a toothbrush moustache was watching television.
‘Dad, this is Mr Plender. From the police. This is my husband. Dad, turn it off.’
Allbright rose, took reluctant steps towards the box while still staring at it, turned the switch and the picture vanished. His wife said, ‘It’s about Louise, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t got any news of her. I wondered if you’d heard anything. She left on Monday, is that right?’
‘Beer,’ Allbright said. ‘You’ll have a drink – Inspector, is it?’
‘Sergeant.’
Mrs Allbright went out, returned with two cans of beer and two glasses. Allbright poured, raised his glass in greeting, drank. ‘You may think we should have been in touch before, but you’ve got to consider my position. I can’t afford to be made a laughing stock.’
‘What is your position?’ Plender asked politely.
‘I’m at Timbals. Assistant works supervisor, Mouldings Division.’ He puffed out his chest as though a medal were on it.
‘And why would you be a laughing stock?’
He looked incredulous. ‘What – if it got to be known George Allbright can’t control his own daughter.’ He paused. ‘Here, if you’ve got no news of her, how d’you know she’s gone?’
‘A friend of hers told me. You can’t keep this kind of thing quiet.’
Allbright spoke bitterly. ‘That dirty little journalist. It’s all they ever think of, publicity.’
‘But Dad, he only did it for the best.’ His wife was timid but determined. ‘What George thinks is, she’s done the same as before.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Last year, when she wanted to go to the Isle of Wight pop festival.’
‘And what happened?’
‘Told her she couldn’t go,’ Allbright said. ‘Might as well have been talking to the air, she just went. Forty-eight hours away, no message. We were worried sick. Then she turned up again, cool as you please.’
‘She did leave a message, Dad, it was just that poster got put on top of it.’ He waved a hand irritably, went out of the room. ‘We did go to the police that time, we felt such fools when she just turned up and asked what all the fuss had been about. But you mustn’t get the wrong idea, she’s not one of those rebels you’re always hearing about She just doesn’t get on with Dad, that’s all. Of course I can see he’s got his position to keep up, but all that trouble about wearing minis. Everybody wears them now, I told him. I don’t care what everybody does, he says, Louise’s my daughter.’
‘What about boy-friends?’
‘Never seemed to have them, or she never brought them home. There was this Ray Gordon, he took her out two or three times and once brought her back here. Then on Saturday night she said one of the bosses at Timbals wanted to make love to her, but she wouldn’t let him.’
‘What was his name, do you remember?’
‘A Mr Vane. Mind you, she may have said it just to spite her dad. But she was always talking about what she’d do, the kind of life she’d live when she got away from here. Don’t be in such a hurry, I said, you’ll soon be at college.’
‘Where did she go on Monday?’
‘To a Keep Fit class at the Institute.’ Tears came from the boot-button eyes. ‘Oh, Mr Plender, I’m so worried.’
A lavatory flushed. Allbright returned with more beer.
‘No more for me, thanks. Two things. Have you got a photograph of her? And could I see her room before I go?’
Mrs Allbright said nervously, ‘Dad?’
‘I suppose so, I bloody well suppose so. She’s my daughter, you know, I’ve got my feelings too. But I’m not going to be made a fool of, and I’m not going to have my name spread over the papers with stories about Hunt For Missing Girl when it’s all a load of bloody rubbish. My principle is the young don’t know as much as their fathers and mothers, and they ought to do what they’re told. Right, eh, Sergeant?’
Plender, who thought nothing of the kind, said, ‘Right.’
Mrs Allbright went through a box of photographs, and he chose a head and shoulders. The picture showed a girl with straight long hair, wide-set eyes and an undecided expression. She was far from beautiful, but there was something attractive about the face.
He could not have said what he expected to find in the girl’s bedroom, but his five-minute look-round revealed nothing helpful. Tennis rackets, pin-ups of Mick Jagger and other pop stars, romantic novels and a couple of books about Buddhism, school textbooks, there was nothing out of the way. He found no correspondence. Mrs Allbright followed every step he took, rather as though Louise might be produced from a drawer or the wardrobe. She couldn’t be sure whether any clothes had gone, but she did not think so. No suitcase had been taken, but Louise had taken with her the blue holdall she always took to the Keep Fit classes, and she could have put something in that. By the time he left she was slightly distraught. Plender told her not to worry.
‘What will you do now?’
‘Tell my inspector.’
When he left the TV was on again.
Hurley was not greatly impressed. Disappearances of this kind, he repeated, were two a penny. ‘What have you got after all, Harry? We’d never have thought anything about the French piece if it hadn’t been for what’s her name, Brown. Then Brown turns up. Now you’ve got another, that’s only two. There are a lot of girls in Rawley.’
‘Do you mean we should just leave it?’
‘Of course not, I didn’t say that. Ask some questions. Quietly, though, tactfully.’
After Plender had gone, Hurley pondered. He ought to cover himself in case the two disappearances were actually connected. He sent a memo through to Detective Chief Inspector Hazleton at Divisional HQ. Rawley contained two Sub-Divisions, Rawley and Burnt Over, and Hurley was in charge of Rawley Sub-Division. The arrangement was rather artificial, because D
ivisional HQ was in the same building, and although Rawley was a town it had no separate police force. Hurley could easily have gone in to see Hazleton, but he was a great believer in getting things down on paper.
The Rawley Adult Educational Institute ran classes in everything from aeronautics and bee-keeping to weight-lifting and zoology. Plender asked for the Keep Fit class, and was directed to Miss Weston in Room 24. There he found twenty women in shorts and vests swinging their bodies about. Several of them were middle-aged. Breasts flopped and stomachs trembled. Miss Weston, lithe and slim, set an example. Music played, Miss Weston and her acolytes chanted, devotees of an ancient ritual. ‘Hup-two-three, down-two-three, left-two-three, right-two-three,’ they breathed in unison. Some of them saw Plender and stopped, evidently glad of the break. Miss Weston became aware of an alien presence. She turned to him, hands on hips. Plender proffered his card. She barely glanced at it.
‘Didn’t they tell you in the office that men aren’t allowed in the classroom? You’re interrupting rhythm maintenance.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t know police counted as men. I wanted to speak to you about Louise Allbright.’
‘I’ll be free in ten minutes.’
He stood outside reading the notices on the board advertising Institute dances, film club, debating society, dramatic society and hikers’ group. The women came out, transformed into Rawley housewives. Then Miss Weston, thin and wiry, hair pulled back. They went to the canteen and she ordered cups of tea.
‘Louise Allbright was in your class. Did she come on Monday?’ She nodded. ‘Anything special about her that evening?’
‘Why?’
Miss Weston, breastless and heavy-browed, looked like an aggressive and, if you cared for such looks, attractive boy. Plender, who preferred round soft girls, found her slightly antipathetic, but he smiled. ‘Keep this to yourself, there may be nothing in it. The class was six-thirty to seven-thirty, she should have gone home after it. She didn’t, and she hasn’t been back since. Now, was there anything special?’
The Players And The Game Page 5