Girl Gone Missing

by J M Gregson

  ‘The question is, where are the books for these building society accounts,’ said Lambert. ‘They weren’t at her home.’

  ‘Removed by Robert Watts?’ suggested Rushton.

  ‘Possible, but unlikely. If he’d had those books, I’m sure he’d have been tempted to try to get at the money by now. I should think it’s someone who merely wished to conceal the evidence of Alison Watt’s money-making activities. Whilst she was merely a missing person, that was successful: it’s only when this became a murder investigation that the details have come out.’

  Rushton said stubbornly, ‘It could still be Robert Watts. He’d have no wish for his wife to discover that his stepdaughter had been extracting money from him, and start asking why.’

  ‘Certainly it’s possible. I just think it’s unlikely that a man like Watts would have resisted trying to get money out of those accounts, as the months passed. And there are other candidates. Jamie Allen had no wish to see the girl he treasured exposed as a whore. Neither, in a rather different way, had Jason Bullimore, if we’re to believe his story that he still entertained rather vague and romantic notions that he might marry her. And what about her headmaster at the school, Thomas Murray, who took away the contents of Alison’s locker and was paying Eddie Hurst for sexual services supplied? The sooner we see that naughty lad the better.’

  Rushton brightened. ‘We’ve got some details now of Murray’s involvement. They called this offshoot of Cotswold Rendezvous ‘Gold Star Services’. Murray seems to have used it to meet young girls for what they called ‘Straight sex of all kinds’ at intervals of about six weeks.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he could afford it much more often, with the prices being asked for ‘Quality and Discretion’.’

  ‘Any evidence of meetings with Alison Watts?’

  ‘No. Discretion being one of the other watchwords of the organisation, it’s possible that neither of them knew that the other was involved.’

  ‘Or that Alison found out about her respected headmaster and saw an ideal opportunity to add to her blackmail list.’

  ‘Alison worked regularly for Gold Star Services, on almost every Friday night and many Saturdays. No wonder she was making money so fast.’

  ‘But not quite as fast as Hurst the Worst, no doubt,’ said Lambert grimly. ‘When was her last appointment?’

  ‘On the night of Friday the twenty-third of July. She should have received a visitor in her regular plush love-nest in Cheltenham at nine o’clock on that night. She never turned up. Gold Star had to smooth down a disgruntled and frustrated customer. A consultant psychiatrist, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘And they say that sex is all in the mind! It looks more and more likely that Alison Watts was either dead by then, or died within an hour or so afterwards. But we shall only be able to prove that when we find her killer.’

  Rushton liked that. Not if, but when. He and John Lambert might temperamentally be miles apart, but they both relished the hunt. Chris knew how far his career had progressed in the team of this man whom he sometimes found so irritating. He said, ‘Jamie Allen is still the last person we know to have seen Alison Watts alive. At about six-thirty, according to his account.’

  ‘And they had what he admits was a blazing row. What about Jamie’s claim that she was going off to see Jason Bullimore, with a view to blackmail?’

  ‘We’ve checked Bullimore’s story that he was in the White Hart at the time in question. His colleague, Fred Souter, confirms that the two of them were drinking together early on that Friday night. Reviewing arrangements for the following year’s teaching before they each went off on holiday, it seems. He can’t be absolutely sure of the time, but he thinks about six-thirty until eight or a little later. It’s still possible that Bullimore saw Alison after they’d left the pub, of course.’

  ‘Possible, certainly. For all we know, they had a meeting arranged. But if she was intending to be in Cheltenham at nine, ready for action with a randy psychiatrist, it seems unlikely.’

  Rushton, who hated uncertainties, said reluctantly, ‘She could have been killed in Cheltenham, of course. Or anywhere between Oldford and Cheltenham. We don’t know what happened to her after six-thirty.’

  ‘I wonder where the girl’s headmaster was on that night,’ said Lambert. ‘My guess is that he was in Cheltenham himself on the evening of the twenty-third, though he hasn’t admitted it. If he was, it would put him right in the frame. We shall see what he has to say about that, in a little while.’

  Rushton said, ‘Robert Watts has still no alibi for that night. He says vaguely that he was probably drinking, but, unlike Jason Bullimore, he has produced no witness to the fact.’

  Lambert levered himself rather stiffly upright and looked at his watch. ‘It’s time for our next meeting with the ungracious Mr Watts,’ he said.

  *

  Number One, The Lawns looked rather more cared for than on their previous visits. The grass at the front of the square house had been cut, the edges trimmed back to a semblance of straightness. Hook had arranged the time for this meeting, and Robert Watts must have been waiting anxiously for their arrival. The door of the blank box of a house opened to them well before they had time to ring the bell, and the householder stood nervously on the step. He was in shirt sleeves, despite the sharpness of the day, but the cuffs of his thick cotton tartan shirt were buttoned and his greying hair was neatly combed, even slicked flat over his temples with water.

  His old belligerence to the police was still there, but it was little more than a ritual defiance now. ‘You’d best come through, I suppose,’ he said, in his surly fashion.

  He led them into the square lounge, where there were changes apparent from the occasion two days previously when they had last confronted him here. There were no empty beer cans. The floor was newly vacuumed. The film of dust which had sheened the television set and the polished wood of the mantelpiece was gone, and there was a vase of spray carnations in the empty hearth.

  But the most significant change of all was a human one. Kate Watts sat in the chair nearest to the window, looking up at them apprehensively as they entered the room, like a child who expected to be chastised for her weakness in returning here. She wore a rather showy paisley dress, not at all the type of garment one wore for housework, and they knew immediately that she had dressed up for their visit. The damage to her face was almost repaired. The swelling on her nose had subsided, the bruising had disappeared, and the make-up was skilfully enough applied for the healing cuts to be almost invisible now on her watchful face. Any casual observer would scarcely have detected that this woman had been hit so hard so recently.

  Lambert nodded to her. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Watts. Nice to see you looking better.’ He would make no comment on the wisdom or otherwise of her return to this house. It was not his business, and as always when he neared the climax of a murder investigation, he was becoming more blinkered in the pursuit of his quarry.

  He turned to her husband. ‘We are much nearer to finding out who killed Alison now,’ he said calmly. ‘The evening of Friday the twenty-third of July is the crucial time, as I indicated it might be when we spoke to you last. We have still not been able to establish any clear account of your movements on that night. You said last time we were here that you weren’t even sure of them yourself. I now ask you again to tell us where you were and at what times on that night.’

  Kate Watts looked at him anxiously, even fearfully, as if the formality of Lambert’s challenge alarmed her. Was it possible that she had never considered until now that her husband might be asked to give an account of himself as a suspect in Alison’s death? He did not return her glance but said stubbornly, ‘I don’t know. It’s too long ago. I didn’t kill her, you know. And I told you everything I could last time.’ Only then did he glance sideways at his wife. ‘Look, there’s no need for Kate to be involved in this, is there? She’s been upset quite enough already.’

  In his clumsy way, he was trying to protect her,
thought Lambert. So Kate Watts hadn’t discussed his abuse of her daughter with him yet; probably he still thought she didn’t know about it. And if they hadn’t spoken of the abuse, Kate wouldn’t know about the money Alison had extracted from her husband. He wondered if this fragile relationship could possibly survive the revelations which must surely fall upon it soon. Before he could say anything, Kate said, surprisingly calmly, ‘I want to stay, Superintendent Lambert. I want to know all about my daughter, you see. And most of all, I want to know who killed her.’ She glanced at her husband, did not return his small, nervous smile. Hook wondered if she suspected Robert Watts of dispatching Alison from the world, if she had returned home to be present when he was arrested.

  Lambert looked at her for a moment, trying to estimate her emotional stability. Then he gave the briefest of nods and said to her husband, ‘If you can’t tell us where you were on that night, we need to check with you on your last contact with Alison, to see if you have any better idea than others we have talked to of her movements on that night.’

  He said sullenly, ‘I’ve told you all I have to say. I don’t see —’

  ‘I can tell you about the last time Alison was here, about what she was doing then,’ said Kate Watts unexpectedly. ‘No one has troubled to ask me much about it. Perhaps they thought I would be too upset to give them anything useful.’

  Hook, preparing to write, thought that she had the calm which descends upon people when they summon concentration during moments of extreme stress. Probably when all this was over, when they had gone, she would collapse into weeping; he wondered whether Robert Watts would be able to provide her with any consolation or would be angrily thrust aside.

  Kate Watts said, ‘Alison was here until about half past five, quarter to six perhaps. She was getting her clothes ready to go off into Cheltenham. I was worried about that, but as usual she wouldn’t tell me who she was meeting. Then that boy came round. The one from the school. She’d finished with him, I thought, but he kept hanging around.’

  ‘Jamie Allen?’

  ‘That’s him. Well, he came round and persuaded her to go out for a walk with him. I don’t think she wanted to go, but perhaps she thought she might finally get rid of him, if they had it out.’

  ‘Did she come back here after that?’

  ‘Yes. At about half past six, I think. But the boy wasn’t with her. She said she’d sent him packing, that she didn’t expect to see him again. She was quite upset about things he’d said to her, I think.’

  And perhaps Jamie Allen was even more upset by the things Alison Watts had said to him, Lambert thought grimly. ‘And when did she go out again, Mrs Watts?’

  Kate Watts pursed her lips, glanced at her husband, looked back at Hook’s ball-pen poised over his notebook, as if she knew the importance of this and was determined to get it right. She was surprisingly calm, for a mother who must at least suspect by now that she was talking about her daughter’s last hours on earth, but no doubt she had reviewed these events in her own mind many times over the weeks since her daughter had disappeared from her life. ‘She wasn’t in the house very long. I remember she grumbled a bit about Jamie and the way he’d thrown her schedule out. She said she’d probably have to get a taxi — I remember that because I told her she shouldn’t be so extravagant.’

  ‘And what was her reaction?’

  ‘She just laughed at me. You know, the way girls do. Said I should get used to thinking big, that she didn’t intend to be poor like us for the rest of her life.’ She glanced across at Robert Watts again, as if she feared he might take this as a slur on his ability as a breadwinner, but he kept his eyes unblinkingly on the carpet in front of his feet. Plainly Kate knew nothing of the money her daughter had wrested from Robert Watts.

  ‘Did she call a taxi?’

  ‘Not from here, she didn’t. She showered and changed and rushed out of the house again. She couldn’t have been here much more than twenty minutes.’

  ‘So she left here at what time?’

  ‘About ten to seven, I suppose.’

  They would check the local taxi firms again, of course, though they had already drawn a blank there. Drivers would remember a pretty girl in the early evening normally, but it was the old problem of scents gone cold. Few people had clear recall after an interval as long as eleven weeks. But perhaps this time they would be able to suggest a few possible destinations to jog the memory of the drivers.

  ‘Do you know where she planned to go to in this taxi, Mrs Watts?’

  ‘No. She was getting more and more secretive about the places she went to. Especially at the weekends.’ For the first time, tears brimmed in her eyes. ‘I wish I’d pressed her harder about that, now. She might still have been alive today, if I’d been able to control where she went.’

  It was a sentiment both the CID men had heard before, in similarly tragic circumstances. They made soothing noises, said that they didn’t think anything Kate Watts might have done would have prevented this particular death. Eventually she collected herself, .wiped her eyes, nodded two or three times, as if trying to convince herself of that, and said, ‘I don’t know that she got a taxi at all, you know. She might have said she was going to get one just to annoy me.’

  And even if she had taken a taxi, she could have used it to take her back to Jamie Allen as easily as to take her to the house where she expected to find Jason Bullimore; she could have gone to see this increasingly dubious headmaster of hers, Thomas Murray; she might even have journeyed to meet her stepfather, Robert Watts, who was still unable or unwilling to provide any account of his own whereabouts on that night.

  Watts stayed sitting upon the settee in the lounge, unwilling to meet their eyes, as Kate Watts showed them out. She shut the lounge door behind them, whispered in the hall, ‘I’ve come back to him, as you can see. They all advised against it, but I think we’ll be all right, now that he’s had a shock.’ Her hand strayed automatically to the bruises that had almost disappeared now from her face and she glanced swiftly at the oblong mirror in the hall as they passed it. ‘He’s a good man, really, you know — just a bit weak when things get on top of him. He says he loves me, and I believe him.’

  They didn’t argue with her: they knew the statistics about battered wives, but they weren’t social workers. They couldn’t tell her how to come to terms with a stepfather’s abuse, still less about how to deal with her daughter’s extortion of money from him. And how would the knowledge that her darling Alison had worked as a high-class prostitute for one of the area’s most notorious villains affect the fragile health of Kate Watts? It was a relief that their first, indeed their only, concern must be whether the limited and now tortured Robert Watts had killed his stepdaughter.

  Kate Watts thanked them for their efforts, smiled a farewell to them from her doorstep. Then she turned back into the house and the still unsuspected horrors which lay ahead of her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A check of the Oldford taxi firms revealed nothing. No one remembered Alison Watts. If, as Kate Watts had suggested, her daughter had taken to regular use of taxis, someone should have remembered a pretty girl like Alison, even if they could not recall the particular occasion of Friday, 23 July. No one did. Wearily, DI Rushton began a second trawl through the much longer list of hire car firms in Cheltenham and Gloucester.

  In due course this would mean a second, probably fruitless, series of enquiries for the officers on the edge of the case, who were probably losing interest as they began to feel themselves peripheral to an investigation which had centred increasingly upon the school and the home of the dead girl, despite the luridness now revealed in her weekend activities.

  The four men who had been repeatedly questioned knew now that they were suspects, and they watched, waited and wondered. They wondered about the extent of police knowledge, about what moves were going on without their knowledge to press the enquiry forward. Robert Watts struggled with the thought of what he had done with Alison and the poli
ce knowledge that he had paid her to keep quiet about it. With his battered wife newly returned home, it was not the best basis for a new beginning. Jason Bullimore and Jamie Allen, fulfilling their different functions in the daily life of Oldford Comprehensive School, moved like men treading an unreal world. Alison’s death and the thrusting progress of the investigation lay over everything for them, reducing what might have seemed important in staffroom and classroom to a charade, played out whilst they waited for the next and final instalment in the real-life drama which had caught them up.

  And Superintendent Lambert and Detective Sergeant Hook, hustling forward the action of this drama, drove out to see the wife of the fourth man, the Headmaster of Oldford Comprehensive School.

  *

  She was waiting anxiously for their arrival. They saw her pale, pretty face at the window of the room to the right of the porch as they went up the path to the front door. A nice sheltered spot this, the gardener in Hook noted automatically. Even this late in the season, the rich red Gloucestershire soil was still thrusting its nourishment into the roses which bloomed prolifically around the porch of Cotswold stone.

  She stood in the doorway before they reached it, taut with stress, forcing a small, mirthless smile, in a parody of a normal social greeting. ‘Ros Murray,’ she said, before they reached her. Then, because she did not know how to behave at a meeting like this, she thrust out her hand stiffly towards them. Each of them shook it in turn as Lambert introduced them. Hook said, ‘It was good of you to see us at such short notice, Mrs Murray.’

  She said, ‘I preferred that we should have this meeting while the children were out at school.’ Not to mention their father, they thought. She offered them tea, because again she did not know what was expected of her in these strange circumstances.

  Lambert smiled and refused. ‘This needn’t take long,’ he said.

  Ros sat on the edge of her chair, smoothing down the creases of her trousers over her knees, conscious of her hands as she couldn’t recall ever being conscious of them before. They were not part of her; they were things on the end of her arms which seemed to have a life of their own, which seemed to be intent on betraying her by waving ridiculously in the air without any command from her brain. She folded her arms determinedly, then found that her hands were back on her knees unbidden within seconds. These men did not seem unfriendly. But they watched her, unashamedly, and she became conscious of her every movement.