The Devil's Chair

by Priscilla Masters

  Mansfield said nothing, but he shook his head and chewed on his lip so hard a drop of blood appeared, which he licked away as quickly as a frog swallows a fly.

  SIX

  Monday, 8 April, 3 p.m.

  Alex Randall had returned to the Long Mynd and was standing on the Burway, looking down into the crash site and Carding Mill Valley. An icy wind seemed determined to pierce his coat so he held it tighter around him as he studied the area. It was all too was easy to follow the trail of destruction the car had left: broken bushes, deep furrows in soft, muddy turf ending three hundred feet below at the bottom in a large oil slick. The wrecked car, which had been treated by the fire service with as little respect as a tin of baked beans, lay drunkenly on its side. Jagged shards of metal showed where Tracy Walsh had been cut out of her eight-year-old, post-office red VW Polo. Police tape fluttered everywhere, keeping the general public out though they peered from all four sides of the valley, curious. The area was as alive and busy as an ant hill but the Burway was firmly shut and would remain so until they had extracted every single piece of forensic evidence from the area and found the child. Found the child? Randall’s face froze.

  What was the hope, realistically? That they would come across a small body thrown from a car wreck? A body? It had always been a dim possibility and even that was fading fast. No. That wasn’t the answer. In his heart Randall had little hope of finding Daisy Walsh alive and a cold, milky sun did little to lighten the proceedings and give him hope. He observed the scene from the top and felt a heavy misgiving which was almost a dread. He could not erase his image of the child, injured and frightened, crawling in the cold and the dark through the terrain, unseen by the officers, who from this vantage point looked as small as pygmies, combing every bush and tree until they found her. Or some sign of her. A few officers in fisherman’s waders paddled up the stream, lifting stones and pulling water weeds out of the way. The general public would be excluded for a little while longer yet. Daisy had now been missing for thirty-six hours and the truth was that however thorough the search was they were unlikely to find a frightened child shivering behind a bush. If Daisy had been in the car the search now was for a body. Randall frowned. Or else she had been abducted from the scene, probably by their mystery caller. His underlying dread was that they would find nothing. Ever. They would never be certain what had happened to the little girl.

  The weather was cool but as Randall took a few steps down into the valley the wind dropped and it became muggy. Tonight there would be more thick fog. The Devil’s own weather, it was said amongst the locals. The damp folded him into it like a blanket and for a moment it misted out the view so he felt he was alone and the other personnel somewhere else behind a thick screen. It was disorientating. He could not say exactly where he was. He was aware he must be careful not to step over the edge and, like the VW, tumble down into the valley. Then the mist cleared a little so he could look around him. The surrounding colours were muted: soft greens and browns, as gentle as English – or Welsh – countryside. This was, after all, the border between the two countries. In this blanketing fog even the voices of the officers were muted, their shouts softly distant and less staccato.

  Randall took a few more steps up the Burway, rounding the corner and climbing the steep slope to where Roddie Hughes, ex-SOCO, now an independent crime scene investigator, was ignoring the damp to kneel on the floor. Dressed in a white forensic suit, he was measuring tyre skids with a woman, presumably a colleague, at his side, filming the proceedings. Roddie specialized in vehicular crime scenes. He stood up and grinned as Randall approached him.

  ‘Afternoon, Alex.’

  Randall returned the greeting and focused his attention on the tyre marks. Roddie scratched his head and looked ruefully at the damp knees of his forensic suit. Doubtless underneath he would be wearing a smart city suit and at a guess that too would have damp knees.

  ‘She was doing about fifty,’ he observed, looking around him.

  Alex grimaced. Fifty might be reasonable on a straight road or a dual carriageway but on this narrow, winding and precipitous road it was breakneck speed.

  Roddie continued: ‘She wasn’t even driving straight on the way up but when she came around this corner she must have had a bit of a shock.’ He took three steps backwards. ‘Here,’ he said, stamping his foot down on a thick spread of rubber. ‘It must have been right here. Which means …’ He stepped forward ten, twenty yards and looked down at the road surface, ‘… whatever she saw must have been around here.’ His voice tailed off. Neither man could see any sign of activity at this point.

  Randall frowned. While there were clear tyre marks where Tracy had slammed on her brakes, there was no corresponding skid beneath Roddie Hughes’ feet on the road. ‘It can’t have involved another car,’ he said slowly, ‘or we’d see more marks.’

  Hughes shrugged. ‘Not,’ he said, ‘if the other car was already stationary.’ He hesitated. ‘It might have been nothing. She’d been drinking heavily. She might have thought she saw something without there being anything really there. It might even have been …’ His eyes drifted upwards towards the Devil’s Chair looming through the mist. Then he looked back at DI Randall. He was watching the detective very intently as he spoke. Alex felt something uncomfortable in his gaze and turned to look at him. ‘Oh, surely, Roddie, you can’t believe all that …’ His mouth opened and he was tempted to laugh. ‘Not all that Devil stuff, folklore, surely?’

  Again, Roddie shrugged. ‘She might have thought she saw something like that. You have to admit,’ he said, looking around him as the mist danced, ‘this is an eerie place, particularly at night. Strange, inexplicable things do happen here.’

  As he was speaking the woman straightened up and Alex met a pair of very fine grey eyes fringed with long, curling black lashes. She was tall and long-legged, with silky brown hair and a very forthright stare. She gave Hughes a swift, prompting glance and he flushed. ‘This is, erm, this is Sophie,’ he said with more than a hint of embarrassment. The girl’s eyebrows lifted and she watched him with an amused expression. Hughes drew in a deep breath and finished the sentence with resignation. ‘My fiancée,’ he said.

  Randall felt his mouth twitch. Last he’d heard Roddie Hughes had been married to a teacher and had two teenage kids. As he shook the girl’s hand and congratulated his colleague, Randall still felt bemused. Did no one stay married for the long haul anymore? The hollow answer returned like an echo, to mock him. No one except you, Alex. He felt his mouth tighten primly. Of all life’s little ironies, this one dropped a bright red cherry right on top of the cake. As the happy couple busied themselves collecting samples, measuring distances and taking a hundred and one more photographs, stills and movies, DI Alex Randall felt he could have stood there, on that big damp hill for a long, long time, pondering life matters, particularly his own, but he was distracted by a shout. Someone, at the bottom of the valley, was holding something high, like a trophy. Randall quickened his step and slid down the bank. Please God, let it be something that leads us to the child, he prayed. Had he been a Catholic he would likely have crossed himself too. He almost did anyway.

  As he got nearer he recognized the officer as PC Gethin Roberts, who was holding something small, sodden, grubby and pink in his hand, rivulets of stream water trickling down his arm on to the grass. It was a child’s sodden slipper with wet nylon fur. Roberts looked pleased with himself. They had the Jellycat squirrel and now they had a slipper. Both were signs that the child had been here. Holding it in his gloved hand, Gethin Roberts approached Randall. ‘Sir,’ he said.

  Randall studied it. It looked about a four-year-old’s foot size, as far as he was an expert on the size of children’s feet.

  Don’t go there, Alex.

  On the front was a worn plastic moulding of a Barbie doll. He took out his phone and connected with DS Talith.

  ‘Are you still with Mansfield?’

  ‘Just left, sir,’ Talith replied. ‘We�
�re on our way back to Shrewsbury. Not that we learnt anything,’ he enlarged grumpily, ‘except that Tracy and Neil were a dysfunctional, miserable, drunken couple. And,’ he added bitterly, ‘it sounds as though Mr Mansfield is up to his old tricks again.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Doing a bit of decorating, if you get what I mean, sir.’

  The way Talith had uttered the words Randall got what he meant all right.

  ‘We’ve found something, Talith,’ he said. ‘A little girl’s slipper that looks about the right size for Daisy. I want you to go back,’ he instructed. ‘We’ve only found the one – so far. Don’t tell him it’s turned up. Just ask him what Daisy’s slippers were like. This one’s pink with a Barbie doll on the front.’

  ‘Righto, sir. Yes, sir.’

  ‘Don’t tell him that we’ve found it,’ Randall repeated, although he knew Neil would guess. ‘Just ask and then get back to me.’

  The sodden slipper was placed in an evidence bag and the team began to search for the other. As they focused on the area along the stream an orange flashing light strobed up the valley. The recovery truck had arrived. Noisily beeping its intention it reversed into position, the driver climbed out and started talking to the officers. The wrecked Polo would now be winched on to the low loader then taken to the police pound – every inch of it scrutinized and analysed to yield its story. Randall watched it gravely. He had his doubts that any evidence from the car would tell him the whereabouts of the little girl. A drunk driver falling off the Burway – Tracy wasn’t the first and she wouldn’t be the last. He wanted to find Daisy. The rest was no real mystery. In some ways he almost agreed with Abel Faulkener’s well-voiced opinion. It really was as though the child had been spirited away by fairies.

  He turned away from the scene. Not one person would swallow that explanation.

  Talith was none too pleased at having to turn the car around and drive back down the A49 to Church Stretton. He wasn’t at all keen on having to visit Mansfield and the shabby home again either but if the child’s slipper had been found at least it bore out the claim that Daisy Walsh really had been in the car on the fateful night and something had happened to her. Surely, he reasoned, they would soon find her? He gave Lara Tinsley a swift explanation as he did a U-turn on the A49.

  As they pulled back up outside the house Mansfield was just getting into his van. He looked surprised to see them again. Surprised and – again – there was that radiant hope that they were bringing Daisy back to him.

  They were going to have to disappoint him for the second time that day.

  Mansfield stood, frozen, on the pavement and waited for them to draw near. He was oblivious to an elderly woman pulling a Sholley behind her who muttered crossly at having to detour on to the road, the shopping echoing her disapproval as she dropped off the kerb. She continued chuntering until she was yards past while Mansfield stood rooted to the spot, unconscious of either her presence or her annoyance.

  He took a step forward, hands outstretched as though he would lift the invisible child from their arms. ‘You’ve found her?’

  Lara Tinsley put a hand on his arm as she shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said gently, then, ‘it’s best if we go inside, Neil. We won’t be long. I just have a simple question.’

  Mansfield’s hand was shaking as he tried to put the key in the lock. They could see numerous dents and scratches where he and/or Tracy had fumbled to insert the key before. As it finally slipped in he turned around, opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Instinctively Talith knew that Neil Mansfield was not asking the question that hovered on his lips because he was afraid of the answer they would give: We’ve found her body. They both felt sympathy for him but were mindful of DI Randall’s instructions. Mansfield wasn’t quite in the clear yet. Who knows. The entire story might still have been fiction.

  They waited until they were inside and the front door closed behind them before Talith spoke. ‘I’m sorry, Neil,’ he said, ‘we haven’t found her.’ Then he asked casually, ‘You said that Tracy had put Daisy’s dressing gown on?’

  Mansfield nodded.

  ‘Did she put the little girl’s slippers on too?’

  Mansfield’s eyes panicked and Talith realized he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. He pressed on quickly. ‘Did Tracy put Daisy’s slippers on?’

  Neil Mansfield seemed unable to answer. He frowned, looking bemused.

  ‘Slippers? I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘You asked that before. Why are you asking again? What’s it got to do with …’

  His thought processes were too slow to work it out for himself.

  ‘Try to remember,’ Lara prompted gently.

  Mansfield shook his head.

  ‘Think,’ Talith prompted.

  So Mansfield made an effort. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and muttered the word slippers. For a moment nothing happened. Then his eyes popped open. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think she was.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  Neil Mansfield gave a snort. ‘Fluffy pink things,’ he said, almost smiling.

  ‘Any motif?’

  ‘Some Disney thing, I think,’ he said. ‘A doll or something.’ And then it clicked. The colour drained from his face. He looked from one to the other, blinking quickly. ‘You’ve found them, haven’t you? Is she – was she—?’

  ‘Wearing them? No.’

  Talith would have found it easier if he could have told Mansfield that they had found a child’s slipper but Randall had instructed him not to so he was left with an awkward silence which Mansfield interpreted with a bowed head. ‘OK,’ Talith said eventually. ‘Sorry to have held you up. Were you going to the hospital?’

  Mansfield nodded. ‘In the morning. I’m bloody dreading it,’ he confided. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.’

  Lara resisted making the unhelpful comment that it wouldn’t matter much. People on ventilators weren’t usually up to scintillating conversation – or violent quarrels for that matter. But Tracy Walsh’s alcohol level on a drip would probably be the lowest it had been for years, so maybe it would be worth a try.

  They left.

  It could be hard to keep the general public out. Back at the Burway a few people must have got through somehow. They must have walked over the hills via the public footpaths either down in the valley to the crash site or to the point where Tracy Walsh’s car had first left the road. A few bunches of flowers with attached notes of sympathy had been laid as tributes on the verge.

  Randall looked around him. Was he being watched? Had the search been thorough enough? Had they missed her? Walked over the very spot where her body was? The Long Mynd was full of gulleys and undergrowth, the mountains looming up, forbidding. There were small caves and places where trees had fallen, leaving landslips of mud and roots, somewhere where a four-year-old could, it was possible, be imprisoned.

  The question was a drumbeat in his mind. Was she here?

  The day was still dull, grey and miserable, reflecting his mood. There was hardly a hint now of any sunshine. As he scanned the horizon Alex Randall believed that somewhere, on these mountains, laid the answer. Beneath were ancient mine workings, tin and other minerals. And then the sun came out from behind a cloud so he was only aware of the raw beauty of the place which inspired him to believe that Daisy Walsh was still here. She had never left the Long Mynd. He scanned the horizon and caught sight of the shape of the Devil’s Chair through the mist. She might be hurt. She could be dead. She could be injured but she was – still – here. He watched the searchers, some on the heights, others wading through the brook, still more painstakingly searching the entire valley. There was a buzz around the incident room in the National Trust teashop, a concentration of busy people. The low loader, with its orange lights flashing and warning beeps, struggled back down the narrow valley, taking with it the wrecked vehicle. Randall shook his head. He wanted – needed – inspiration.

  And then the mist part
ed and he saw the small white cottage named Hope Cottage. He strolled across to WPC Delia Shaw. ‘We need to take a walk,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

  SEVEN

  They slipped on wellington boots, zipped up their oilskins then traipsed the half mile to Charity Ignatio’s cottage. It was a modest-looking place, whitewashed, with no more than a patch of steeply sloping hillside as its garden and a tiny patio just big enough for a table and two chairs. It was plain and lacked any sort of inspiration. It looked somehow featureless, anonymous. There was nothing particular to mark it out. No car stood outside. Charity was still in the Middle East, somewhere up country now and not expected back for more than two weeks. They had managed to speak to Shirley, the cleaning woman who had returned from Spain and let them into a small secret. Randall handed Delia Shaw a pair of latex gloves and they pushed open the wicket gate and stepped into the garden, climbed up to the front door. ‘Now then,’ Randall said, finger on chin. ‘We need to gain entry without putting up the Shropshire Police’s bill for door bashing.’ To his right was the white flowerpot prettily planted with lemon primroses. Randall lifted it up and sure enough exposed a Yale key with a plastic tag on it. He held it up as a trophy. ‘Helpful of them to label it “front door”,’ he observed and sighed. ‘Oldest trick in the book. I wonder why people aren’t a little bit more imaginative.’ He inserted the key in the lock and opened the front door. The house was like the Tardis – much bigger from the inside than it looked on the outside. Open plan, with pale walls and white-painted furniture, it looked quite spacious. Slipping on overshoes they stepped straight into a sitting room, long windows to the front overlooking the hills. The Silent Hills, as Malcolm Saville had called them. Randall looked at them through the window. He could have done with the hills being a little less silent. But then when have hills spoken? He creased his face up as he recalled The Sound of Music, then realized Shaw was watching him. ‘Sir,’ she asked uncertainly. He simply smiled. He wasn’t going to share this one with her.