Girl Gone Missing

by J M Gregson

  It was the one with the rounded, rubicund features, the one who did not seem threatening at all, who said to her, ‘We are here because we should like to establish what your husband was doing on the night of Friday, July the twenty-third. I know it’s quite a long time ago, but if you could —’

  ‘More than eleven weeks ago. Not many people could remember what they were doing on a particular night, at this distance in time.’

  ‘No. That is quite true. But we understood that —’

  ‘And lots of people couldn’t provide you with alibis, you know. It doesn’t mean that they’re not perfectly innocent.’

  Lambert intervened. ‘That’s true, of course it is. We find it demonstrated all the time. It’s just that when people can show us that they were in a particular place at a certain time, we can eliminate them from some of our enquiries. And we understood that there was a chance that your husband —’

  ‘Tom. Tom was at the cinema with me on that night.’ She seemed to find no contradiction in this with what she had said earlier. Instead, she went on quickly, almost eagerly, ‘We went to the multiplex in Gloucester. To see The English Patient. Very enjoyable, it was. Not quite as good as I’d expected, though. But other people had been too enthusiastic about it to me, I think.’

  She trotted the statements out without inflection, like a bad actress reading from a text she had only just seen. Now she paused, as if that text said that there should be a question at this point. Lambert behaved as though he had not read it, and Ros Murray’s soft brown eyes switched swift as a bird’s from one face to the other of the men before her and back again. There was a long interval before Hook said, ‘What time would this be, Mrs Murray?’

  Ros thought the cue had come at last, even if belatedly and from the wrong person. ‘We left here at about six-thirty. Had a drink before we went into the cinema, you see. When the film was over, we came straight back here afterwards. We reached here at about eleven. Neither of us went out again.’ She had rehearsed it carefully, but it would have come out more convincingly if they’d drawn it from her by questions, instead of receiving it in a continuous monologue like this. Still, she got the facts out, as she and Tom had agreed them, and she didn’t think she had missed anything vital out. It was a relief to get it over with; she’d told Tom she was no good at this, and she knew now that she was right. Without the little bit of Dutch courage she had administered when she knew the CID men were coming, she wouldn’t have managed it at all.

  There should have been some reaction from these men, some nods of assent, some acknowledgement that what she had told them was helpful to them. Even some subsidiary questions, maybe even a little doubt that she could assuage, would have been better than this long, assessing silence. When she could stand it no longer, she said, ‘I can tell you things about the film, if you like. To prove we saw it, I mean. Ask me about anything you like in it.’

  Lambert sighed. ‘I’m sure you could tell us all kinds of things about The English Patient, Mrs Murray. The important thing for us is whether you saw it on the night of the twenty-third of July.’

  ‘We did. I told you we did. Told you the times.’ The hazel eyes which had stared steadily ahead of her through her recital of the facts were now cast down. Her wide mouth was set in a thin line.

  Lambert wondered why worthy women were so often drawn into lies for worthless men, why that particular strand of the human tragedy seemed to be paraded so often before him. He said wearily, ‘We shall need the name of your baby-sitter, of course.’

  ‘Our baby-sitter?’

  ‘Mrs Murray, you have two young children. I’m sure you are far too responsible a mother to have left them unattended for four and a half hours. The person who was with them on that night will be able to confirm your story to us.’

  Suddenly, she was furious with Tom. He had put her through all this, and yet not even thought of this obvious thing. Or had he asked the girl down the road who sometimes sat for them to lie for him, too? How far did this web of deceit stretch? How many innocent people were to be called upon to lie to protect her husband’s precious skin? Ros said dully, ‘There was no one here that night. Except me. We did go to see The English Patient in Gloucester, but not on that night.’

  Lambert said softly, ‘No, I thought not. And where was your husband on the night of the twenty-third of July, Mrs Murray?’

  The hands which had so troubled Ros lifted from her knees, waved without meeting each other through the air, and fell heavily back on to her thighs. ‘You’d better ask him about that.’ She looked up appealingly, fastened upon Hook’s large, sympathetic face, which swam a little through the moisture that had sprung to her eyes. ‘And tell him — oh it doesn’t matter! I was going to say tell him that I did my best for him, but what’s the use of that?’

  She watched them go from the step where she had greeted them, her face a strange mixture of distress and relief. As Lambert marched quickly away down the path, Bert Hook said softly to her, ‘Next time you feel you need a drink to face people, you’d be better to go for the vodka than the whisky, m’dear. You can’t smell vodka on the breath, you see.’ He gave her a quick smile of sympathy before he followed his rapidly disappearing chief.

  They both knew as they drove away that it would be better to get the story of where he had been on that night from Murray himself. For it might be that the truth was even worse than whatever he had confessed it to be to his distraught wife.

  *

  Police procedures are neither as rigid nor as effective as Chief Constables and Home Secretaries like to emphasise they are to an anxious public. The machinery and the methods are subject to human error, and they can go horribly wrong, not just in high-profile instances such as that of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, but in less publicised cases as well.

  More often than policemen would like to admit, a piece of luck or a piece of stupidity by a criminal — often they are the same thing for the CID — hasten a solution. One such incident now accelerated an arrest in the Alison Watts murder case.

  The man looked as if he was already regretting his action when the young WPC ushered him briskly past the murder room and into the office of Detective Inspector Rushton. He wore a leather jacket with the top two buttons undone and fashionably shabby jeans. He had a young man’s shambling gait, as if he had not yet cast off the uncoordinated movements which stem from rapid teenage growth; it was the kind of stooping walk which still makes ageing brass-hats scream for national service and army discipline.

  Chris Rushton’s experienced eye took in a different picture. Not violent, he thought — certainly far too embarrassed to be aggressive here. Not on drugs, for he was clear-eyed and conscious of everything around him. Scruffy, but basically clean, with straight hair which was long enough to drop down over the left side of his face. Vulnerable probably, if you got to him whilst he was still apprehensive. ‘You’ve come here to tell us something. Best spit it out, then!’ Rushton said briskly. Only then did he indicate that the young man should sit in the chair on the other side of his desk.

  ‘It’s — well, it’s about this murder case. The Alison Watts one.’

  ‘Clearly. You wouldn’t have been shown in here if it hadn’t been.’

  ‘No. Well, it’s a bit difficult for me, you see. I’m not quite sure I should be here at all, really. It’s — well, it’s just from a sense of public duty.’ He smiled an awful, sickly smile to go with this declaration of civic conscience, then wiped it rapidly away as he saw how fiercely Rushton was glaring at him. ‘I — I used to give her lifts, you see, Alison. And I heard you were asking round about who might have done that.’ If he had had a cap, he would no doubt have twisted it between his fingers; as it was, he had to make do with a vigorous wringing of the hands themselves.

  Chris Rushton pushed himself back in his chair, trying not to reveal the hope which was surging within him to this callow young sprig. ‘You mean you’ve been running an unofficial taxi service. Unregistered. Unlicense
d. Plying for hire while not on any official list. Naughty, that.’

  It was common enough. Men got themselves a roomy car and `moonlighted’, usually at nights when there was plenty of business about for hire cars, often combining the activity with a day job or omitting to declare such earnings when they registered as unemployed. A busy police force generally ignored the practice, unless it was blatant or the registered cabbies insisted upon some action against the cowboy operators. Rushton’s fingers ran rapidly over the computer keyboard, opening up a new file. ‘Better have your name, hadn’t we?’

  For a moment the man looked as though he would argue. Then he shrugged hopelessly and said ‘Wayne Hopkins. I was intending —’

  ‘And you say you picked up Alison Watts. When?’

  ‘Well, regularly, I suppose. Friday nights, mostly. And some Saturdays; most Saturdays, I think, over the last few months before she disappeared. And once or twice on Sundays.’

  ‘Quite the regular chauffeur for the young lady. Unofficial and unlicensed. And where did you pick up and drop her?’

  ‘I collected her in Cheltenham. At half past eleven at night: always at the same time and from the same place.’ He gave the name of the apartment, which Rushton didn’t trouble to record. It was the same address he had noted elsewhere as the flat where Alison Watts had operated so lucratively for herself and Eddie Hurst. ‘And where did you take her?’

  ‘Home, always. Well, not quite to the door of her house, but virtually there. I only live round the corner, about a hundred yards from her house. She always got out outside my garage and walked the last bit. She once said she needed a bit of clean air before she faced her mother.’

  ‘Do you know what she was doing in Cheltenham?’

  The young man reddened. Like his shambling walk earlier, it made him look younger than he was. He was probably about twenty-three, but his embarrassment seemed to take six years off him. ‘No. I asked her once, but she told me that was her business, not mine.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Alison’s activities on those weekends would be public knowledge soon enough now. Rushton kept his voice studiously even as he said, ‘Did you pick her up from the usual place in Cheltenham at eleven-thirty on that last Friday night, Wayne?’

  ‘No. I should have done, but she wasn’t there. I was there on time at half past eleven, but she didn’t come down when I rang the bell. And there weren’t any lights on in the flat.’

  *

  Lambert marched impatiently into the now familiar Head Teacher’s office at Oldford Comprehensive School. The door was scarcely shut before he said, ‘You lied to us, Mr Murray. And you asked your wife to lie on your account, making her an accessory.’

  ‘She rang me, Superintendent. I’m grateful to you for coming here so quickly, so that we can sort out this misunderstanding.’

  ‘No misunderstanding, Mr Murray. Deliberate deceit. Obstructing the police in the performance of their duties. Not a good example to set, for a man in your position.’

  Murray winced automatically at the mention of the public persona he had spent so much of his time polishing over the last ten years. ‘There is surely no need to take such a high-handed attitude over a little economy with the truth. It was venal of me, even silly of me, I admit, but scarcely more than that.’ He spread his hands wide, attempting the urbanity he had ceased to feel with the first high-pitched words of his wife’s excited phone call to him a quarter of an hour earlier.

  ‘Not so much economical with the truth as contemptuous of it. You lied about your whereabouts at a time when a girl you knew was being murdered. You were not at the multiplex in Gloucester nor at any other cinema on the night of July the twenty-third last. And you were certainly not with your wife.’

  Murray’s blue eyes widened as he stared at his inquisitor. Then, suddenly, his head was in his hands. Whether it was a genuine breakdown in control or whether this despair was assumed to gain a little time for thought was not clear. The CID men were in no mood to waste time puzzling about that. Hook said, ‘If it helps you to tell the truth, you might as well know that we know all about your involvement with Gold Star Services in Cheltenham.’

  He looked up at them with that, his blue eyes dry but wild. ‘You know about that? I — I can’t even tell you who ran it, you know, I —’

  ‘We know all about it, Mr Murray,’ Lambert interrupted. ‘It’s a part of a large criminal empire, run by a man named Eddie Hurst. There will be a court case, in due course. You may very well be one of the prosecution witnesses in it. Unless of course you are then awaiting trial on a charge of murder.’

  ‘I didn’t kill Alison Watts.’

  ‘That has yet to be established. Where were you on the night of the twenty-third of July?’

  ‘In Cheltenham’

  ‘Taking advantage of the pleasures offered by Gold Star Services.’

  ‘Yes. Look, Superintendent. I like the company of young women. All right, I like having sex with them. I have a high sex drive, and a job which offers me few opportunities to release it. You must have come across plenty of people like me.’

  ‘You also have a loyal wife. More loyal than you deserve, perhaps. But that’s not our concern. What interests us is that you removed evidence in the course of a murder investigation. It was you who took away the contents of Alison Watts’ locker at school. You who carefully removed the secret things, which she kept at school because she didn’t want them discovered at home.’

  ‘The building society books, you mean. I didn’t destroy them. I have them here under lock and key.’ He turned the lock in the top drawer of his desk and produced two newish-looking account books for the Halifax and the Cheltenham and Gloucester Building Societies.

  Lambert did not take them from him and he put them down on the surface of his desk. They lay like an accusation between the cornered man and his questioners. ‘Why did you choose to withhold this evidence, Mr Murray?’

  ‘I met Alison in Cheltenham one night, about three months before she disappeared. I knew from where I saw her that she was operating for Gold Star Services. She was going into a flat I’d used myself on a previous occasion for one of my — my assignations. I think she realised a little while later that I was one of the Gold Services clients. She made a remark when I met her in a school corridor that we might eventually meet professionally, in a different context.’

  ‘So her disappearance was highly convenient for you. And her death was even more so.’

  He nodded miserably. ‘I suppose so. I didn’t kill her.’ His eyes were fixed upon those innocent-looking deposit books at the other side of his desk, as if they might spring up and claw him at any moment.

  ‘Had Alison Watts attempted to blackmail you with the knowledge she had acquired about your sexual excursions?’

  He looked up then, wanting to deny it, knowing the admission would take him further into the morass. Then he nodded dully,

  ‘She had a hundred pounds from me, a week before she died. She put it straight in there, I think.’ He indicated the Halifax book. He shrugged wearily. ‘I didn’t intend any dishonesty when I hid these books. I just thought that if I could hide what she had been up to at the weekends, my own involvement with Gold Star Services might remain secret as well. Alison Watts was only a missing person, not a murder victim, when I hid them, you know.’

  ‘Yes. Except that one person at least knew that she was dead. The person who tightened a ligature of some kind around her neck until she could no longer trouble anyone. Were you that person, Mr Murray?’

  ‘No. I may be a lecher, but I’m not a murderer.’

  He looked at them desperately for some sign of acceptance of that claim. They did not comment. Hook put the bank books into a plastic folder and they left. When the headmaster’s secretary took him in his afternoon cup of tea ten minutes later, she thought that Thomas Murray, whom she was used to seeing so breezy and confident, looked like a man at war with himself.

  *

  Christopher Rushto
n was taking great care to get everything he could out of Wayne Hopkins. Someone should have unearthed this shambling young man earlier, but he could dish out the ritual bollockings later. Not only did it look as if the man was pure gold, but he had presented himself personally to Detective Inspector Rushton. It was just as they said, you made your own luck in this game. If you worked hard and systematically, instead of racing round town and countryside like old John Lambert, you collected the occasional piece of good fortune, and deserved it.

  He said, ‘So Alison wasn’t there when you went to collect her in Cheltenham at eleven-thirty on that last night. But you ferried her about at other times as well, you say, Wayne?’

  ‘Yes. She used me more and more, over those last few weeks before she disappeared. And she paid me well: almost as much as an official taxi would have cost her. She said she could afford it. Time was money to her, she said. She laughed about that.’

  ‘Yes, she would do, I expect. And when was the last time you saw Alison?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. I heard you were asking around about who picked her up on that last Friday, when she disappeared. It was me.’

  Rushton suppressed a sudden urge to hug this shambles of a man who had appeared so tardily with what might be priceless information. Instead, he looked at him sternly and said, ‘It’s taken you a hell of a long time to remember this. Why didn’t you come forward when the girl first went missing?’

  The head with its lank hair wobbled unsteadily from side to side. Wayne Hopkins was wondering even now what would happen to him at the end of this. Was it a criminal charge, operating a taxi service without a licence? Even murder becomes secondary to one’s own survival, when seen from the perspective of an inexperienced young male who suddenly realises he has not behaved as cleverly as he thought. ‘Well, she was only a missing person then, wasn’t she? I didn’t think it was important. And I —well, I thought I might have to give up all the money I’d made by carrying passengers without a licence. I couldn’t have done that, you see, ‘cause I’d spent it. Bought a newer car.’ For a moment, his eyes brightened even now with the vision of that sleek maroon Granada which Alison Watts had done so much to provide for him.