Girl Gone Missing

by J M Gregson

  Rushton’s natural inclination was to keep the lad hopping about. Apprehensive witnesses revealed most, in his book. But he was too eager for information now to worry much about tactics. ‘So you had Alison Watts in your car on Friday the twenty-third of July last. At what time?’

  ‘She came round to my house and asked for a lift. About quarter to seven. Perhaps just after that, but not much. She said she was running late and needed me to get her back on schedule.’

  ‘And where did she ask you to take her, Wayne?’

  ‘An address out on the Hereford road. I dropped her off at the end of a little cul-de-sac just beyond Fownhope. I saw her walking down to the end whilst I was turning the car round. I think she went into the last house. I’d never taken her out there before. I can’t tell you whose house it was.’

  But you don’t need to, DI Rushton thought with satisfaction. It was the house of Jason Bullimore.

  Chapter Twenty

  IT was late afternoon now on this perfect October day. The blue of the sky was deepening; there was not much light left. The air was very still, and there would be a frost before morning. The last of the sun slanted in between the Black Mountains of Wales on his left, dazzling but intermittent, as Lambert drove the old Vauxhall cautiously towards Hereford. There was no hurry now to play out the last scene of this tragic drama. No one else was in danger from this murderer.

  When it came into view behind the high cypress hedge, the house of Jason and Barbara Bullimore was as quiet and still as the dying day. There was no sign of movement as the CID officers walked to the front door beside the rectangle of closely mown lawn. The borders had already been cleared of summer bedding at the time of their last visit; now someone had planted wallflowers in neat rows. Too neat, to Hook’s mind; they looked in their precisely spaced ranks like soldiers parading in the weedless soil.

  There was no sign of any presence in the square 1930s house, no car on the drive in front of the garage. When they rang the bell, the noise rang loud behind the door in what seemed an empty house, and there was no sound of the muffled movements which a ring or a summons often provoked in residents busy about their business. Yet within five seconds of their ringing the bell, the oak door opened, almost noiselessly, and Barbara Bullimore stood imposingly upon the step above them.

  ‘My brother isn’t here,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Maybe it’s better that way,’ said Lambert. He marched unbidden into the house, through into the lounge, with its heavy three-piece suite, its tall pillars of hi-fi speakers, its pictures of the dreaming spires of Oxford. The patio doors were shut now upon the secluded garden, where well-staked dahlias provided brilliant flashes of colour in the twilight, lamps which would be extinguished by the frost which would come with the darkness.

  Barbara Bullimore had followed rather than led them into the room. She said, ‘I suppose you’d better sit down,’ as ungraciously as she could. But petty rudeness was not her style, and she was clearly disconcerted. When she saw the two tall men seated on the settee, she sat down herself, almost as an afterthought, on the single upright chair in the room. She said with an attempt at contempt, ‘Well, what progress have you made with your enquiries into the death of this wretched girl?’

  It was a mistake. It was not like her to fill silences, and it showed her nervousness, rather than her disdain for these men and the law they represented. Moreover, it emerged as a real enquiry, not the slight on their labours which she had intended. She was genuinely anxious to know how far they had got in their efforts to find the killer of Alison Watts.

  Lambert watched her steadily as he said, ‘We know a lot now about the last movements of Alison Watts on the night she was murdered. We have a picture that is almost complete.’

  She nodded, looking past them and out of the window, watching a thrush trilling its last song before the night on the top of the lilac tree at the end of the garden. ‘Really? And what brings you here to disturb my day off from the rigours of the library service?’

  ‘Alison hired a car to bring her to this house on the last evening of her life.’

  ‘Really? You surprise me, Superintendent. At what time is this visit supposed to have taken place?’

  ‘Alison arrived here at about seven o’clock.’

  Barbara Bullimore’s broad face allowed itself a smile, not of triumph, but certainly of satisfaction. ‘Then she was out of luck, Mr Lambert. I worked late on that Friday, and my brother wasn’t here either at that time. I believe he was having a drink with one of his colleagues. But I think you already know that: he told me yesterday that you had been asking him about it.’

  ‘We did indeed. And we have since had confirmation of his movements from the colleague he was with on that evening.’

  ‘Then forgive me, Superintendent, but I don’t see that we can be of any further help to you. If the girl did indeed come here, she obviously found no one at home and went on elsewhere.’ ‘No, Miss Bullimore.’

  ‘But yes, Mr Lambert. I tell you my brother —’

  ‘I told you that we checked on Jason’s whereabouts on that night. We also checked on yours. You weren’t working.’

  She folded her arms, stiffened her back until it was even straighter. ‘That doesn’t mean I was here.’

  Lambert looked at her evenly. ‘You were here, weren’t you? Alison Watts was last seen coming into this house. I don’t believe she left it alive.’

  Barbara Bullimore’s brown eyes widened a little. She stared unblinkingly back at Lambert. There was an animation, even an excitement lighting up her plain face now. She could have denied it, made it difficult for them, made them bring a team to search the house, the garage, the car, in minute detail, scratching for the evidence of what she had done. She was too proud a woman to prolong the process with such deceit. Instead, she said in the low, even voice of one in a trance, ‘My brother is worth ten of that little tart! And she could have ruined him.’

  ‘So you killed her.’

  She rounded on him with flashing contempt. ‘I removed her from the world. So that Jason and other decent people like him could get on with their lives. People who could do some good in the world. I terminated her rottenness, that’s all.’

  It sounded like an argument she had rehearsed often to herself, in the privacy of her bedroom, fighting the desperate loneliness which surrounds a murderer, who can confide in no one. Lambert said quietly, ‘I should have known you’d done that, much earlier. You said the first time we came here that you’d read that the girl had been strangled with some form of ligature. That never appeared in the press reports, because we didn’t release it until the inquest. ‘Strangled’ is all that appeared in the press. But you told us about it, two days before it became public knowledge at the inquest.’

  She nodded, as if she, so proud of her own professional skills as a librarian, appreciated professional skills now in her adversary. ‘I checked the papers after you’d left on Saturday. But I didn’t think anyone had spotted my little gaffe.’ She allowed herself a rueful smile, as if she had conceded a vital pawn to an opponent who would make the most of it.

  Lambert said gently, ‘You had better tell us what happened on that Friday night, Barbara.’

  It was the first time he had used her forename, an acknowledgement that it was over, an anticipation of the long years she would spend in confinement. The librarian Barbara would have bridled at such familiarity; the murderess merely nodded, as if she accepted it as a natural progression of events. ‘That girl said that Jason had been to bed with her, had enjoyed what she called ‘his bit of fun’ with her. I expect it was true. He’s a bit weak that way — he means no harm, but he’s a bit irresponsible at times. And women find him very attractive.’

  She shook her head, sadly but affectionately. Hook thought, Her brother is still about fourteen for her, a high-spirited lad who has to be protected. The trouble is, she doesn’t want to let that young brother go, doesn’t want to let him grow up. Aloud, he said, ‘And did Alison Wat
ts say that she proposed to exploit Jason’s weakness with her?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She looked at the sergeant she had treated with cold hostility at their previous meetings with something like affection now. He seemed like a man who would surely understand what she had needed to do on that night. ‘The little hussy didn’t want to talk to me about it at first, but I got it out of her soon enough. She said it was time for Jason to pay up for what he’d enjoyed. He’d — he’d had good service from her, she said, but it wouldn’t do him any good if it came out at the school. There were times when she thought it might be her duty to write to the governors about it, she said, but she was sure that could be avoided, if we came up with a decent sum. Say about five hundred, to start with.’ Her revulsion for the moment and the girl flared out as she quoted the last phrases.

  It was Hook, who seemed to have taken on the role of her confessor now, who had to prompt her. ‘And you told her you weren’t going to be blackmailed like that.’

  ‘I told her what I’ve just told you. That my brother was worth ten of her and we weren’t going to see his career ruined by a little slut like her.’

  ‘And how did she react to that?’

  ‘She laughed in my face like the slut she was. Then she said we’d have to see what Jason had to say about that. I — I was a little worried by that. Jason is weak, in spite of all his talents. And he isn’t as clear-sighted as me. He might even have been prepared to pay her something, in the hope of buying her off. But they always come back, don’t they, blackmailers?’

  ‘Almost always, yes.’

  ‘Well, I think it was at that moment that I realised something had to be done about Alison Watts.’ She smiled grimly, as if the thought of her action gave her satisfaction, even now, when retribution was at hand. It was one of the faults of obsessively tidy people that they saw decisive action as a way of putting things in order, even when it might be a wrong, morally impossible action. Barbara Bullimore saw herself as bringing order back into the lives of herself and Jason, ignoring the fact that she had turned the normal moral canons upside down to do so.

  ‘So what did you do, Barbara?’ Hook, who had never thought to use the familiarity of a forename with this Amazon of a female, urged her gently forward into the last phase of her awful story.

  She leaned forward a little on the edge of her upright chair, as if taking these men into her confidence about some small, unimportant matter. ‘I said I’d see what money we had in the house. Then I went out into the garage and found a short length of the plastic-coated wire we use for tying up plants. It was just where I’d expected it to be.’ It would be, thought Hook grimly; there was no chance of this woman being rescued from herself by anything being in the wrong place. ‘When I came back in here, the girl had seated herself in that armchair.’ She indicated the chair by the empty fireplace with its high back towards the door. ‘I had never invited her to sit down, anywhere, least of all in Jason’s chair.’ She added this detail triumphantly, as if it were the last item in the catalogue assembled to convince them of Alison Watts’ worthlessness.

  The pause told Hook that it was time again for some phrase from him to draw out the final section of what would become in due course a signed statement. ‘So that was the ligature you spoke of having killed her.’

  She nodded. ‘She had her back to me as I came through the door. She asked how much I’d managed to find in my piggy bank. She was only beginning to turn her head as I threw the wire round her neck.’ She smiled, an awful, childish smile, the smile which would, in due course, excite the psychiatrists called in by the defence. ‘It didn’t take long to kill her. The wire was very effective, once I pulled it tight against her neck. But I saw the fear in her eyes, in her last seconds. It pleased me, that.’

  ‘But then you were left with a body.’

  ‘Yes. I closed her eyes after a minute or two. Decided I didn’t like them staring out like that. They seemed to be following me round the room. Then I put her in the boot of my car and drove out into the Forest of Dean. I was waiting for it to get dark, but it seemed to take an awfully long time for that to happen. I didn’t want to leave the car, somehow, even though the boot was locked. I remember I parked in the middle of the forest, near the Speech House, and read a book for quite a long time.’

  ‘And where did you put the body in the river?’

  ‘Oh, I knew where I was going to do that. I was just waiting for it to get dark. I thought Symonds Yat might have people around, even at that time of night, so I kept well away from there. But I knew just where I wanted to park: a little bridge over the Wye near Goodrich. I only had about twenty yards to carry her down to the water, but when I got there, I decided to drop her off the bridge, to make sure she went in where the water was deepest. She was very light, really, when I got her over my shoulder. I put her down between the car and the river and tied the sack of coal I’d brought to weight her down onto her leg. I put the girl on the parapet of the bridge first, then lifted the coal and heaved it over the edge so that it took her down with it. They made quite a splash as they went. The water came right up and hit my face.’

  She seemed to find each detail more satisfying. Hook said, ‘And no one saw what you were doing?’

  ‘No. It’s a quiet enough spot. I’d have heard any vehicle coming when it was at least half a mile away, but not a single car came past in all the time I was there. It’s only a minor road, with a nice old stone bridge. Jason and I have done a stretch of the Wye Valley walk from there. But I’ve not been back there since that night.’

  ‘Did you come straight home from there?’

  ‘More or less. I sat in the car for about ten minutes after I’d got rid of the body, thinking about what would happen next.’

  ‘So what time did you get back here?’

  ‘Just before eleven. I told Jason we’d been saying farewell to one of the library staff who was leaving, and went straight to bed.’

  ‘Did you tell him what you had done when Alison was posted as a missing person?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t. I didn’t want Jason involved in any way.’

  Love can be the most dangerous passion of all, when taken to excess, thought Lambert. It undermines reason and judgement faster than anything. He said, ‘Does he know now? Does he even suspect what you have done?’

  ‘No, I know he doesn’t. He’s only a silly boy in some things, you know, despite his learning. An innocent at large.’

  It was a phrase which would haunt them in the weeks to come. They rode silently in to the station at Oldford, where she was put in a cell for the night. She turned back to Lambert and Hook as she entered the cell. ‘You’ll let Jason know what’s happened, won’t you? Try to let him down lightly — it will be a shock to him. You — you’ll tell him I did it for him, won’t you? Tell him he’ll need to look after himself in future.’

  The arms clasped across her formidable bosom and she reared herself to her full five feet ten as she watched them turn away. The broad, plain face lit up with a smile as the door was shut upon her.

  If you enjoyed reading Girl Gone Missing you might be interested in Body Politic by J. M. Gregson, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Body Politic by J. M. Gregson

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘Of course there are things wrong with the country,’ said Raymond Keane. A winning frankness was one of his strongest cards in friendly company, and he reckoned they didn’t come much friendlier than the lady with the elaborate blue hat and the little smear of cream on her upper lip.

  ‘You mean people sleeping in cardboard boxes and so on?’ she said, anxious not to miss her cue, determined to keep her MP with her for a little longer before he moved on, as she knew he must, to the next smiling listener, to the next vol-au-vent and warm white wine.

  Raymond watched the patch of cream bobbing as she spoke, like a white horse on a choppy sea. ‘That, of course,’ he said. ‘Though I think we could agree that most of the people who clutter our
city streets have chosen their own fate. I was thinking more of the way we have to look under our cars in the Commons park for bombs before we drive away.’ Middle-aged ladies in Gloucestershire liked a little frisson of vicarious fear, he knew that from experience. It was years now since he had checked for bombs, but the danger card was still one to play to build up a little sympathy.

  The gathering was going well. The conservatory of the big house, Victorian in its proportions as well as its design, made the crisp winter day outside seem warmer than it actually was: only the leafless trees and the bright red stems of the dogwoods beyond the wide green lawns revealed that the bright blue sky beyond the double glazing was in fact a winter one.

  Raymond Keane had his professional equipment in good working order. The smile was practised but the brown eyes remained earnest, never setting into the enamelled mask he had seen in less able Westminster men. No one knew better than he the benefits of a safe Conservative seat, especially now that what had once seemed comfortable majorities were under threat in many parts of the country. In this part of Gloucestershire, where the Beaufort rode regularly and royal estates were discreetly hidden behind ancient trees, his support might be diminished but the seat was rock-solid safe.