The Devil's Chair

by Priscilla Masters

It was like finding a port in a storm. He sank down into the chair; put his hand over his face. ‘Just her blood-stained dressing gown,’ he said, his fingers trying to erase the creases from his forehead. ‘We haven’t found her or her body.’

  ‘And you think it was planted there in the last twenty-four hours?’

  ‘I know it was,’ he said. ‘There is absolutely no way we would have missed it on our search, quite besides the evidence of the very observant man who found it. He runs the same route every single day and the dressing gown, weighted down with a stone, is bright pink and lay at the bottom of the brook. If you want to know what I think,’ he continued, his voice angry, ‘I think it’s all a big tease. Someone out there is enjoying themselves playing games.’

  ‘You think she’s dead?’

  Reluctantly, Alex Randall nodded. ‘She probably died in the accident or soon after it.’

  Martha was still. It had been a terrible case from the start. Could it get any worse?

  ‘And there is always the chance that she was badly injured in the accident and is dying right now. Martha,’ he appealed, ‘what sort of person would do this? Why not give up either the child or her body? What can they possibly hope to gain by this concealment? Is she dead and part of some bizarre and horrible ritual?’ He wished the phrase did not resonate quite so loudly around his head. He wished that the accident hadn’t happened in a place with such a bad and sinister reputation.

  She leaned towards him, extending her hands across the desk, and Randall continued.

  ‘The nightmare is not that she’s dead but that she’s alive, frightened, hurt and in danger, a four-year-old in the hands of a sadist. A sadist who wants to extract the maximum pleasure from it all, a person who is not only callous and sadistic towards a child but also wants the police to be publicly humiliated. And …’ The hazel eyes searched hers as you would search for a hand in the dark. She was so tempted to console him, to reach out and stroke his cheek.

  Martha exerted an iron resolve. It wasn’t going to happen.

  She read pain in his eyes. Pain she had seen even before this case had wrapped its chilly fingers around his neck. He was in a truly awful place. Silently, she waited.

  Back at the station, Coleman’s assiduity was paying off. Now he’d cracked the pattern of computer use he was finding out more and more. Looked at from this different angle it was interesting, intriguing and thoroughly puzzling. Now why on earth would Tracy have been searching this particular site set up for people who desperately wanted a family but were unable to conceive?

  She must have been a little bit web-wise because all her emails prior to 6 April had been deleted. There was nothing that predated the accident. The whole lot had been scrubbed out. She’d covered her tracks. And that, in itself, was unusual, not to say very unusual, not to say strange, not to say thoroughly bloody suspicious. Coleman blinked, his brain working overtime. There was not one single email left in the box that was dated before 6 p.m. on 6 April. Nothing in Draft. Nothing even in Spam or Trash that predated the accident. Tracy had dumped the lot, clever girl. Well, Coleman reasoned, Tracy or Neil had something they wished to bury very deeply. And he was pretty sure it was Tracy.

  She had been cute. Everything on email post-dated the accident. He went through them methodically but, like many other people, most were advertising something – tooth whitener, holiday bargains, cruises. Tracy had lived a life of wishful thinking. There were plenty of online shopping sites, some of them for perfumes and fancy goods, others for the big supermarkets. Coleman went through them all and came up with … nothing.

  Now then.

  Coleman decided that Tracy was either one of those very tidy people who clear up their emails on a daily basis, which he very much doubted or, much more likely, she had something to hide. But she couldn’t delete all her clues. The first email in the box was for 6.30 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, 6 April, so her deletion had happened sometime on the Saturday evening, before she’d left the house with Daisy. Clue one.

  He took a swig of lukewarm coffee and leaned back in his chair. So no emails, only the browsing history. Well, well, well. This was interesting. But what on earth was she doing, looking at these sorts of sites? Coleman scratched his head. This didn’t make any sense.

  He called up Neil Mansfield. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘It’s PC Coleman here. I wonder … You and Tracy only have Daisy, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Mansfield’s answer was suitably truculent and defensive.

  ‘She didn’t have any other children?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’ Mansfield paused. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I ever really knew her. Know what I mean?’

  Yes and no, Coleman thought, and pursued his point. ‘She’d never had a child adopted?’

  Mansfield sounded bemused. ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Did you want more children?’

  ‘No.’ Mansfield’s patience was running out. ‘I’d had enough of her. We were going to be splittin’ up, no doubt about it. If she hadn’t had the accident we probably wouldn’t still be together.’ He paused. ‘We’d have split up before the accident if it hadn’t been for Daisy.’ Another pause. ‘The last thing I’d have wanted is more kids – with her.’

  ‘But you were fond of Daisy.’

  ‘Yeah. Daisy was a little darling. Unlike her mother.’

  Coleman persisted. ‘But you say you weren’t trying for a baby?’

  ‘No.’ Said emphatically.

  ‘Was Tracy trying for a baby?’

  ‘Not that I know of, though I wouldn’t have put anything past that conniving little …’ Then he remembered. Tracy was dead. ‘Look,’ he said suddenly, ‘the inspector’s had me up the nick for ages. What is all this about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Coleman answered honestly. ‘I’ve been going through the sites that were visited on your computer. A lot of them are to do with women who can’t have children.’

  ‘Well, that wasn’t Trace, I can assure you. She got pregnant with Daisy really easily, or so she told me. And she was on the Pill. To be honest she wasn’t that maternal. If she’d found out she couldn’t have had children her attitude would have been, “Oh, goody, now I don’t have to bother with the Pill.”’

  Coleman frowned at the screen, trying to make sense between what his ears were hearing and what his eyes were seeing.

  ‘Look, mate,’ Mansfield said into the silence, ‘I don’t want to be rude but at the moment I’m a bit tied up trying to organize her funeral, which is proving surprisingly difficult. I had to wait for the coroner to release the body for burial and all of a sudden bloody Tracy’s mum and sister seem to want to get involved. Call me cynical but I get the feeling they just want to be part of the media attention. Sad, isn’t it? We’ve had so many arguments – just about a funeral.’ He sounded incredulous. ‘But I’m the one who knows what Tracy’s wishes were. They don’t.’

  Coleman was listening with less than half an ear.

  ‘I know she didn’t want no flowers – or so she said – but they seem to want the damned lot. Horse and carriage, half a florist’s. I told ’em she didn’t want no flowers. She wanted money to go to her chosen charity, not a load of flowers that are dead two days after the funeral.’

  And all of a sudden Coleman’s ears pricked right up. ‘What was Tracy’s charity?’

  ‘Something about woman who can’t have children,’ he scoffed. ‘Don’t know why she’d be interested in that sort of thing. But sometimes she did have a kind heart,’ he conceded.

  It wasn’t much of a tribute.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Saturday, 27 April, 3 p.m.

  Sam was at a match. This time she had not gone with him. He’d had a lift with a Shrewsbury friend who also played for Stoke. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny and very tempting to sit and read in the garden once Martha had finished her chores. She leafed through the paper. It had consigned Daisy Walsh to page four and the fairly predictable headline of:
r />   WHERE IS SHE?

  She looked at the now familiar picture. Papers usually stuck with the one image and used it over and over again. She closed her eyes for a moment but could still see the outline of the child, curly hair and small, round chin. Much as she’d tried to push the case to the back of her mind and focus on other things it still lay there, an amorphic unhappiness. She read on.

  There had been various spurious sightings from Glasgow to Bournemouth, Anglesey to Norwich, but none had turned out to have any connection with Daisy. One little girl had subsequently turned out to be ten years old and her mother had been affronted at the confusion with a missing four-year-old. There was a note of indignation from mother and daughter. No regrets. She read on, realizing that there was nothing new. The child had simply vanished as though she had followed Alice’s fate and fallen down the rabbit hole.

  Would they ever know the child’s fate or would her story prove to be another Madeline McCann: her fate a subject of endless conjecture with no facts and no explanation? Just stories? Would she be relegated into folklore? A threat to naughty children, that they too could vanish like Daisy Walsh?

  She closed the paper, feeling unhappy and anxious in spite of the beautiful and welcome sunshine that beamed in through windows, freshly polished by a vigorous and suddenly extra house-proud Vera, her daily, or more precisely twice weekly cleaner.

  But Bobby was wagging his tail optimistically and dogs do have to be walked. Maybe her daughter would like to join her so she called up the stairs. ‘Sukey – fancy a walk?’

  A face appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘With Bobby?’

  ‘I thought we’d just go through the woods, towards Haughmond Abbey. It’s such a lovely day,’ she coaxed, hoping her daughter would join her. She loved her chatter and besides, with these morbid thoughts about Daisy Walsh going round in her head she wanted to keep her own child close, though Sukey was more woman than child and Martha had the feeling she would be able to look after herself.

  Other parents have made that same mistake.

  Sukey appeared at the top of the stairs, thought for a minute then said, ‘OK. Yeah. Why not? Just wait a minute, Mum. I’ll be down.’

  For a slim young woman Sukey made an awful lot of noise as she galloped down the stairs moments later in tiny denim shorts and a loose cotton top under which Martha suspected she was wearing nothing at all.

  She sighed. Women of a certain age, particularly when they’d breast fed twins for six months, needed what her mother coyly called support. Ah, well, that was the price of motherhood. But there were compensations too. She pocketed her mobile phone and the dog lead, Bobby now thumping the floor with his tail as though it was a bongo drum. And how could a mongrel manage such an expressively hopeful look? He was just a dog.

  Haughmond Abbey was the ruin of a twelfth-century Augustinian monastery. It was a spectacularly beautiful sight on the east side of Shrewsbury, slightly elevated so it provided a perfect view over the town’s skyline and the beginnings of the Welsh hills beyond. It was surrounded by a wood and a network of footpaths and was a popular site for dog-walkers. Added to that list of recommendations it was only a short walk from The White House, Martha’s embarrassingly pretentiously named home. When she and Martin had moved there fifteen years ago they had tried to think of a new name that would not sound as though they were mimicking a connection to the home of the president of the United States. The trouble was that the house was well named, being large and white, even with a bowed veranda at its front. It sat like an iceberg with a nose and on balance they had decided that they would sooner live in The White House than the Iceberg with its unpleasant connotations of sinking ships. And so, she suspected, the name would stay. She looked back at the house and remembered. Those had been the happy days – before Martin fell ill.

  Sukey’s long legs ending in Reeboks strode out along the path slightly ahead of her, Bobby keeping a watchful eye on the two women. He had a tendency to herd them like two dippy sheep. But they’d only gone a couple of hundred yards when Martha’s mobile buzzed in her pocket. She recognized the caller ID: Simon. Simon Pendlebury, who had once been married to her dear friend, Evelyn. But, like Martin, Martha’s husband, Evie had died and since then an uneasy friendship had sprung up between the two bereaved people. Uneasy? How so? First of all, uneasy because Martha didn’t quite trust Simon. From humble beginnings he had become one of the super wealthy and she didn’t quite know how except to trust that her friend, Evie, would never have condoned anything dishonest or underhand. Evie had been one of the most decent people Martha had ever known and she would not have married Simon unless she knew the answer to this puzzle.

  Secondly Simon (and necessarily Evie too, although it was hard to believe) had somehow bred two of the most insufferable, selfish, ghastly daughters, Jocasta and Armenia. It would be a very brave woman who took on the chore of being stepmother to those two particular vipers: spoiled, demanding, determined to keep their father and their lifestyle to themselves. Martha suspected Simon would not marry again until both his daughters were also wed.

  Her last reason for having reservations about him was that only a year ago Simon who was, like her, in his early forties, had ‘fallen in love’ in the most clichéd and ridiculous way with a twenty-three-year-old girl called, just to complete the idiotic picture, Christabel. It had been a brief and passionate affair, predictably scuppered by the daughters, who had exposed a deprived and murky past for the poor girl and she’d taken off in a flood of tears. Since then Martha had felt even more that she wanted to distance herself from him. However, recently they had fallen back into an easy habit of meeting for dinner or just for a drink every few weeks. It was a casual and undemanding arrangement which suited them both. For all her reservations about him Simon was good company, intelligent, well read, charming and polite. But she could never quite relax in his company.

  And now here he was, back on the line again.

  He must have sensed that she was out of doors, perhaps from the echo of her voice, or maybe the ambient rustle of trees and twittering birdsong. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Walking Bobby,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  He didn’t answer straight away. ‘Wish I was with you,’ he said. ‘Are you on your own?’

  Martha glanced along the path. Though still in earshot Sukey had considerately moved fifty yards away and was playing throw the stick, catch the stick, bring the stick back, with an enthusiastic hound. She was pointedly not listening.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked, more out of politeness than curiosity.

  ‘In the hot office,’ he said, ‘up to my eyeballs and looking out enviously at the bluest sky I’ve ever seen.’ He gave a tight, humourless laugh. ‘I can’t believe I still have to work so hard. Surely I should have some minions to do the dirty work?’

  She caught her breath. Dirty work?

  He continued, ‘But I should be finished in a couple of hours. Are you busy tonight?’

  She wished she was but the truth was, ‘No.’

  ‘Let me buy you dinner?’

  Sukey was still eyeing her. Martha frowned. She didn’t want to go out tonight. Not with Simon, not with anybody. Well, perhaps not with anybody – a certain pair of humour-filled hazel eyes seemed to blink, disembodied, right in front of her, but she certainly couldn’t be bothered to make the effort with Simon. She heaved a great mental sigh and tried to inject some enthusiasm into her voice. ‘OK.’

  ‘Dress casual,’ he said, sounding pleased. ‘I’ll pick you up from your house. Seven o’clock.’

  This was unusual. They usually met at the venue, both driving themselves as though neither wanted to risk extending the evening beyond dinner. Simon had almost never picked her up. Besides, seven was early for him. And he had never rung her in the afternoon to suggest a meeting that very night. Normally she had a couple of days’ notice. The other thing that struck her was that he usually liked to eat at formal hotels. She couldn’t remember a night when he had said
‘dress casual’. So what did this set of unusual circumstances signify? She just hoped he hadn’t fallen in love again. She didn’t think she could bear the toe-curling, cringingly embarrassing confessions. While there had been nothing wrong with poor Christabel there had been the undoubted disparity in their ages. And once the poor child had met Armenia and Jocasta it hadn’t been long before she’d wisely taken to her heels and fled – even from the charming and urbane, expensively suited Simon, his beautiful house perfectly run by a German housekeeper, his top-of-the-range cars and flashy wealth. But once the two daughters had unearthed Christabel’s terrible secret that her father was a jail bird, she had not stood a chance. And Simon’s love had flown straight out of the window. He had never mentioned her since. Such is lurve.

  Sukey was watching her with an adult perception in her bright eyes. ‘You don’t really like him much, do you?’

  Martha defended herself. ‘I don’t not like him, Sukes,’ she said, awkwardly defending herself. ‘I wouldn’t have dinner with him if I didn’t like him.’ She was speaking the truth. It really wasn’t that she didn’t like him. Apart from the little objections she had just raised in her mind there was something else. She sensed a coldness around his heart. An icicle that she believed only Evelyn, with her soft ways and gentle voice, could have melted. The worst was that when they ate dinner together, sometimes laughing about events, she would look deep into his eyes and sense the same fear and knowledge inside him, however hard he tried to conceal it. Only Evie had held the key to his heart and anyone else would only ever come second best.

  Martha knew that she herself had never known the core of the man. Like many charming and sophisticated men he kept his true self well hidden. Tightly wrapped up.

  ‘Yes, you like him,’ Sukey persisted, frowning with adult perspicuity. ‘But why nothing more? He’s good looking,’ cheeky smile, ‘for an older man. He’s got pots of money.’

  ‘I can’t explain,’ Martha said, wincing at her daughter’s avarice. ‘I just know he’s not …’