Joan Eames saw Mrs Anderson and Jim to their house. At the door, she hesitated.
‘Come in and have a cup of tea. Yes, do.’
‘All right. Thanks. I’d be glad to.’ She didn’t really want the tea but she was remembering Coffin’s advice – watch the mother.
‘Come into the kitchen. It’s very untidy, I’m afraid.’ Mrs Anderson put on the kettle and sat her son on a chair by the table, where he started to play with his little wooden horse. Joan thought he seemed quite contented, as if he’d done his job for the day.
He began to bang his horse on the table and sing loudly.
His mother hurried to him. ‘No, be quiet. We mustn’t wake Daddy.’
‘Oh, your husband’s in?’ said Joan, sitting down herself.
‘Yes, he’s lying down upstairs. He’s been up all night trying to help find Belle. He just walks the streets and sometimes he calls her name out.’
He’s more upset than you are, thought Joan, but she didn’t say so. But presently he came down the stairs and into the kitchen, a thin, tall man with fair hair, already going prematurely bald.
He stopped when he saw Joan Eames.
‘This is the police lady,’ said his wife.
‘Yes, I know. I guessed.’ He looked heavy-eyed and exhausted. ‘You didn’t find anything?’
No one answered.
‘No, I knew you wouldn’t. How could you?’
‘Someone will find something,’ said Joan doggedly.
‘Yes, but when will that be? And it’ll be too late.’
This was indisputable and Joan didn’t try to dispute it. She glanced apprehensively at his wife, but she had her eyes fixed on the kettle on the stove, as if she didn’t want to hear what was said.
‘I can’t help thinking that,’ he said. ‘All the time. You’re not doing enough.’
‘We’re doing a lot.’ Joan Eames knew what they were doing; knew how many men were working on it, asking what questions and patiently hearing what answers.
‘Not enough. Nothing’s enough that doesn’t work.’
‘No.’ This too was something Joan couldn’t argue with. Who wanted to. You did your best, but it frequently wasn’t enough. Joan Eames knew the statistics for unsolved crimes, this was part of the dark number of crimes that you didn’t think about too much. Because if you did think about it too much, you might give up altogether, and go and do something quite different, like being a nurse.
‘I suppose they’ve asked you this, but has Belle ever gone off on her own before?’
Husband and wife glanced at each other. ‘Only playing,’ said Mrs Anderson. ‘She was playing in the garden and pretended to disappear. I grumbled at her for that.’
‘Grumbled,’ said her husband. ‘You beat her.’
Mrs Anderson flushed. ‘Well, it was a naughty thing to do.’
‘You beat her afterwards. When you’d gone cold on it.’
‘I wanted her to learn. It was wrong.’
‘She was only playing.’
‘Did she play on her own a lot? Or does she have friends?’ put in Joan Eames.
‘She has friends,’ said Mr Anderson, breaking off his silent quarrel with his wife to look at Joan. ‘All the girls in her class are her friends; all the girls in the streets round here are her friends. You ask and you’ll see.’ What he meant was: and only her mother wasn’t her friend.
Joan drank her tea, said goodbye, and left the quiet bitter family behind her. She hadn’t done much good with the boy, not what you could call a really good morning’s work, but she hadn’t entirely wasted her time.
Watch the mother, Coffin had advised, and she had watched the mother. She knew now that in this little family the mother was the one who wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy, and presumably if she wasn’t happy then the child Belle, who was missing, hadn’t been happy either.
She went back to Coffin and reported this fact. It wasn’t much, but it was what she had discovered.
She thought he didn’t seem too surprised, as if it might have been what he was expecting to hear.
She had another thought too, but this she didn’t pass on; it was that the boy looked cheerful and pleased with himself, and had accepted his present like a reward, as if he had somehow done what was expected of him.
Joan Eames reported back to Coffin, not to Inspector Dove, as she normally would have done, because this seemed expected of her. She was no nearer to feeling easy in John Coffin’s presence, he was unnerving not friendly these days, but she felt that he had the case under control. It was an untidy case with far too many loose ends, but if anyone had them in a grasp, he had.
‘I’m worried,’ she said at once. ‘I didn’t do any good on this trip. And I saw things I’d rather not have seen.’
‘That’s what I sent you out for.’
‘If you unturn a stone in family life then out crawls a slug. A group of little slugs maybe, none ready to kill but all ready to make you sick.’
‘Perhaps it’s not that bad,’ said Coffin, after a pause. He may have been thinking about his own home life which, now she came to think of it, Joan Eames remembered was said to be not all that cosy. ‘Don’t go getting emotional.’ He smiled. ‘Or, as you wouldn’t be much use deprived of all emotion, don’t get too emotional. So all wasn’t love and jam with the Andersons?’
‘It was sort of cold and strange. I don’t like to think what they’re like when they’re on they’re own.’
‘House tidy?’
‘Not very. Was once.’
‘You don’t think the children were happy?’
‘I don’t know about the boy. I couldn’t read him. And I’ve never seen the girl, but no, I don’t think she was happy. I don’t think she could have been. I wouldn’t have been.’ She poured out her impressions of the scene: mother, father, baby brother, friends, she described them all. She felt she was talking too much.
Coffin nodded. ‘Now you can go out and see all the other mothers.’
‘All the mothers?’ She was appalled.
‘Yes, the mothers and fathers and families of all the children who have disappeared. Co on around, talk to them, stay with them, live with them if they’ll let you and then come back and tell me what sort of families they are.’
‘And is this going to help?’
‘I think it could help a lot.’
You didn’t usually question your boss, but there was one question Joan Eames had to ask.
‘I’ve read what’s on the files about Tony Young. His statement about his alleged activities.’ (Sometimes she just couldn’t help talking that way.) ‘Was he telling the truth?’
‘Not all of it, no.’
‘That’s what I thought. I’d like to investigate him.’
‘You may get a chance at that. But the families first, please.’
‘I don’t know if I’d be any good at it,’ her voice faltered.
‘You did a pretty good job on bringing back what I wanted from the Anderson family,’ said Coffin; he was businesslike.
She got up to go. ‘Right then. I’ll do my best. And I’ll write up my notes on this and let you have it. That’ll be it, I suppose?’
‘Yes, you do that. But don’t worry too much. I have it all here.’ He patted a small machine by his side which had been faintly sighing and whirring all the time. ‘I have it on a tape. I think I’ll get more from hearing what you have to say than from anything you write. So whenever you’ve got something to say, drop in and have a talk.’
As she went out of the room, she thought that there were plenty of other tasks she could have been employed on and that this one looked as though it might take weeks. As if he was reading her thoughts, Coffin spoke:
‘And in case you think you’ve got all the time in the world for it, let me tell you I can spare you exactly thirty-six hours.’
‘Counting night and day?’
‘Working round the clock,’ he said with a laugh.
But it was a laugh that turned ou
t serious. Even although she had the list of the families and where they lived already to hand, seeing them was an exhausting and time consuming task. There was also an element about it that she didn’t quite like, of herself as predator. She felt she was hunting these people down.
As well as this, the task is repetitive. Seen close to, these families were all so different, withdraw a few feet and they were all so alike.
All of the families lived pretty close together in Archangel Street and Riga Street and Saxe-Coburg Street, so she took them in no special order but just as she found them in the house. On a couple of the houses she had to call twice. She was on her way to one of them, the Boyle household, now.
The Boyle household had lived with its tragedy for over a year because Shirley Boyle had been the first child to go. Between her and the next child off there had been a gap of a year. This was something to think about, and the detectives had thought about it, but they hadn’t really found themselves any proper answer. You could speculate that the murderer (only no one knew for sure yet if this person was a murderer) had been ill, absent or imprisoned.
She was apologetic at breaking in on the Boyle family at their meal and they were apologetic back to her because they were sitting there eating it.
She loooked unfed; they didn’t. They looked bloated with food, mother, father and remaining two children. Perhaps the mother was really the worst and you only noticed the others were fat because she impressed fatness on you.
‘Anyway it’s a good thing you caught us,’ said Mrs Boyle, swallowing a mouthful of cake, ‘because we’re moving right away. We’ve had enough.’
‘You going far?’
‘Rugby. Fred’s got a job there. We want to get out of this. Shirley’s gone. We won’t see her again. I don’t know where she is, or where she went, or why it happened to us, but staying here’s making it worse, not better. Isn’t it, Fred?’ She turned fiercely to her husband.
‘It didn’t seem right to go at first,’ said Fred Boyle. ‘I thought about Shirley coming home and trying to get into the house and finding fresh faces here and I couldn’t bear it. But now, well, I don’t think she’ll come back.’
‘I know she won’t,’ said his wife, still fierce. ‘And I’ve had enough of the police coming round asking questions that don’t do any good.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Joan Eames apologetically.
‘They’re only doing their job, Eileen.’
‘Oh yes, I know that. Once a month one of them comes in, just to see how we’re doing,’ said Eileen Boyle in savage tones.
‘Oh yes, who’s that?’ said Joan. It was news to her.
‘Coffin. That’s his unlikely name. He’s a high-up.’
‘Yes,’ said Joan. She had a strange picture of Coffin doggedly calling on this family every month and getting nothing for it.
‘I think it’s good of him,’ said Fred Boyle suddenly.
Eileen Boyle shrugged. ‘Good for him. It’s helping him feel better. It isn’t doing much for me.’
She went back to the table and sat down. ‘And now what do you want?’ she said to Joan.
‘I suppose you could say I’ve come instead of him.’ It had just struck Joan that this was what she was doing.
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Well, take your pick. Have a look at us. Ask what you want.’
‘What does he usually ask?’ said Joan apologetically.
‘He asks how we are. I’ll tell you to save you the trouble. We’re fine. Fine. Saving always that we had two daughters and now we’ve only got one and that this time last year I weighed eight stone and now look at me. I suppose I’m about eleven and still putting it on.’ She glared at Joan. ‘I can’t stop eating, you see. It’s a syndrome, that’s what the doctor said. A shock syndrome. I’ve got that instead of a daughter.’
‘Eileen!’ said her husband.
‘Poor old Shirley,’ said the other daughter who had kept quiet until now. She was a tiny plump child, a mature ten-year-old who had the world as well weighed up now as she would have when she was eighty. ‘She was a trouble when she was here and it’s worse now she’s gone.’
‘Julie!’ said her mother.
‘You said yourself what a trouble she was,’ said Julie. ‘Ever so often. I don’t think Shirl liked it!’
‘No child is ever a trouble to her mother,’ said Eileen Boyle.
‘Well, she was to you. Or she certainly thought she was.’
‘Now you’re making that up. You want to show off in front of this lady.’
A screaming irresistible desire to say I’m no lady, I’m a policewoman, came to Joan Eames.
‘She thought you didn’t like her, Mum,’ said Julie. ‘ “ Mum doesn’t like me as much as you.” She often said it. After you’d had a row.’
‘We never had rows.’
Julie shrugged.
‘Do you think she ran away from home because she was unhappy?’ said Joan Eames bluntly.
‘No. Never,’ said Mrs Boyle. ‘She’d have come home, of course she’d have come home. You mustn’t take any notice of what Julie says. The quarrels we had didn’t matter. They were just in the family.’
‘Was she what you’d call a lonely child?’ said Joan Eames.
‘No one’s lonely in this family,’ asserted Mrs Boyle. ‘No one.’
‘Everyone’s lonely sometimes,’ said Fred Boyle, surprisingly.
‘Not what I call lonely,’ said his wife.
‘Would you say Shirley was what anyone else would call lonely?’ said Joan Eames patiently. She had begun to see there might be a pattern in the answers she would get from the families of the missing children.
‘They all go around in a little gang these kids,’ said Mrs Boyle. ‘They’re never on their own.’
Joan looked at Julie. ‘All her class at school were friends with Shirley,’ said Julie uneasily. ‘She didn’t know many in my lot, though.’ The generation gap started at zero.
The next house Joan Eames went to, the home of Grace Parker who had disappeared on April 23, had all the curtains drawn in the front of the house. Quietly Joan walked round the garden path to where she could see the back windows. The curtains were all drawn here too. The flowers in the small garden were neglected and the grass was rank.
It looked hopeless to try but she went round to the front door again and knocked. There was no answer, so she raised the letter box and peered inside. Here too all was still and quiet, but she didn’t think the Parkers were away all the same.
She could see a bottle of milk standing on a table and the post had been picked up and put beside it. Not opened though, nothing had been opened. Over the weeks a pile of letters had grown up there and been left untouched.
She drew a deep breath and turned away.
A woman was staring at her from over the fence. Oh yes, there’s always a neighbour, Joan thought, who knows more than you think she does and yet less than she imagines.
‘You won’t get no answer,’ she said. ‘They never answer.’
‘They are there, then?’
She nodded. ‘You can’t blame them. Didn’t happen straight away. Seemed to come on gradually. He goes to work, you know. Comes out and goes to work. He does the shopping too. Well, they’ve got to live. But you never see her.’
‘How long since you’ve seen her?’
‘Not since just after … you know what I mean. Just after. I don’t like to say it aloud. Such a pity too. Such a nice bright little girl. The only one, too. It’s always worse then, isn’t it?’
Joan dug around for the little nugget of information this woman might yet possess.
‘It’s been bad for you too,’ she began.
‘Yes. You can’t get away from it, you see.’
‘No one can,’ agreed Joan Eames.
‘Oh some can, don’t you worry, some can shut their minds to it and go on just as before. I could name you some names and not for away from here, either. But I’m not like that.’
&n
bsp; ‘I couldn’t be, either.’
‘Yes, well, for you it’s your job, isn’t it?’ said the woman sharply. ‘You never knew her. But I knew that little girl from the minute she was born. Of course, she was a late comer, they’d been married twenty years and I don’t think they knew what to make of this little one when she came. I often used to think she felt out in the cold.’
‘Oh, you did?’
‘Yes. When she first came they used to look at her as if she was a little changeling. They were close to each other and sort of shut her out. Oh, it happens. You can understand it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘But I reckon they feel it now and it’s preying on them and that’s why …’ she nodded her head towards the windows. ‘That’s why that.’
Joan Eames looked up at the darkened windows. She was almost sure she saw a curtain move.
‘They’re watching.’
‘Yes, they do that. I suppose they want to know what’s going on outside. Goodness knows what goes on inside that house. I’ve lived beside them all these years and I don’t know them. But the child was friendly enough, poor little soul. Too friendly for her own good.’
‘Well, thanks for telling me.’
‘I thought the police had given up coming around,’ said the woman, watching her walk away. ‘But you’re police, aren’t you?’
‘We never quite give up,’ said Joan as she went. ‘Sometimes it looks like it, that’s all.’
Finally she tried the family of Katherine Gable in Archangel Street. They were the easiest of all the families to interview, the most normal and yet the saddest.
They simply didn’t undertand what had happened to them. One of their number was gone and the rest of the family huddled together for protection like cattle in a storm. They were all at home when she got there, all crowded into one small room, all six of them. She looked round at them. The average IQ in the Gable family wasn’t very high, but they were good. You could tell that with just one look. The second look showed you that something had crept into the family tree a generation or so ago, some mutation which had survived and marked them all. They were all little people with somewhat oversized heads, hands and feet. Nothing spectacular, they were not monsters, but once you were conscious of it you were very conscious of it. Joan Eames found herself trying not to look. Mr and Mrs Gable both had the same appearance and must have been blood relations.
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