‘Sounds outrageous.’
‘Joe Orton’s written it so half the punters are bound to be offended and demand their money back but a bit of scandal is always good for the box office.’
She filled a kettle from a tap above a dirty sink, put it on a gas ring, then found two cups and a bottle of Camp coffee in a cupboard.
‘So, are you going to tell me your name, funny man?’
‘Me? I’m McCall.’
‘McCall? Is that it?’
‘Well, it’s Francis but I’m usually called Mac.’
‘Saturday was great, wasn’t it? Meeting up like that.’
‘Yes… it was lovely.’
‘I hoped we’d bump into you again.’
‘Did you? Honestly?’
‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’
He dried, couldn’t express what it was he so wanted to say. She smiled at his gaucheness. Everything was understood between them.
The kettle whistled. She poured their drinks and apologised for having no milk or sugar or anywhere to sit.
‘You didn’t ask, but I’m Lexie.’
‘Sorry, that was rude. What’s Lexie short for?’
‘Alexandra.’
‘And you said you’re the dogsbody around here?’
‘’Fraid so but I start my first proper acting job next week.’
‘Really? I bet you’ll be brilliant.’
‘It’s hardly the West End, just touring round lots of schools putting on Shakespeare.’
‘But you’ll steal it. I just know you will.’
‘Flatterer.’
‘No, seriously you will and I shall come and watch every performance.’
She laughed but wasn’t mocking him. Her eyes seemed to peer deep within him. McCall sensed she’d really like him to be there.
‘What about your studies? You can’t just walk away from them.’
‘I almost have already.’
‘But you told us you’re only in your first year.’
‘I am but it’ll be my last. I know it.’
Lexie looked at him as if her mercurial mind has made a decision. She took his cup and put it on the floor by hers, drew him close, her fingers in his twisting gypsy curls. She kissed his lips - kissed him because this is what she wanted and time was short. Her lipstick tasted vaguely sweet and her perfume carried the scent of pleasures unknown.
Then her hands ran the contours of his gaunt, drum-tight body which craved only hers. Lexie backed him through a rail of Victorian dresses left over from some past production.
They lay in the musky, dusty darkness beyond and she unzipped him and took him for herself. There was an elemental remoteness about her, almost animal, disconnected from the then and there. McCall held to her, drawn by such a force of nature he’d never encountered before.
And when at last she was done, when she opened her eyes and was satisfied, then came that coded smile between initiates who now shared a secret. He hadn’t language equal to the moment or to calm his trembling elation.
‘Oh God, Lexie…’
‘Oh God, what?’
‘I’ve never… you know, I’ve never - ’
But they heard footsteps approaching. Lexie quickly led him through another subterranean passage and into the light of a day for which he was born and could never forget.
‘Listen, I have to see you again.’
‘Sure, but I’m late for work now.’
‘I know, but when can we meet?’
‘There’s a big party here tonight. Come to that.’
‘Can I? But what about Mr Gannex?’
‘Evan? He doesn’t like parties.’
‘But he’s your fiancé, isn’t he?’
‘How wonderfully archaic that sounds.’
‘Yes, but he is, isn’t he? You’re going to marry him.’
‘Who knows? Who cares?’
‘Me - I care. Please don’t, Lexie.’
‘Listen, you really have to go now or I’ll be fired.’
‘Don’t do it, Lexie. Don’t marry him. Please, I mean it.’
‘Go on, funny man. See you tonight.’
So the cruel drama of their affair began. McCall was to be tortured by infatuation and jealousy, the ache of separation, of being alone while knowing she was with him.
In that moment outside the Arts Theatre where all was make-believe and pretence, he could only shiver at what he feared and had yet to understand.
But slowly, very slowly, McCall would begin to learn the convenience of lies.
Five
Lexie folded herself into one of the wing back chairs either side of Garth’s wide brick inglenook. The wind sent spatters of rain bouncing down the black void of the chimney to hiss against the burning logs. She wore a red check shirt with the top buttons missing so the soft white slopes of her breasts were just visible.
McCall had been persuaded in bed that there could be a story in the disappearance of Lexie’s ten-year-old niece, Ruby. Lexie was never to be denied.
‘She’s an unusual child,’ she said. ‘Quite brilliant in one way but so, so vulnerable.’
A photograph taken at Manor Hill primary school in north London showed a querulous-looking child, small for her age, with wild curly hair, a floral pinafore dress and sandals. Police had rung Lexie’s apartment in Bristol to check if Ruby was there.
‘I told them she’s so unworldly that she barely understands the concept of money or buying tickets for a train or coach,’ Lexie said. ‘She gets bullied a lot so escapes into her own fantasy world of fairy castles and unicorns.’
Other children said Ruby had been taken over by demons. She’d hit one and made his nose bleed and been excluded from school last term.
McCall poured Lexie a glass of Italian liqueur made from almonds and set it down on the hearth by her side, glowing gold in the firelight.
‘So there’s something wrong with Ruby… psychologically?’
‘It’s called Asperger’s syndrome,’ Lexie said. ‘It means she can’t read other people’s feelings, hasn’t got a clue about the effect of what she says or does has on anyone.’
‘It must be a great strain living with her. How does your sister cope?’
‘Badly, I’m afraid. But Etta’s never lived in the real world, either.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She’s into tarot cards and mythology, paganism. All that alternative tosh.’
‘So you two don’t get on?’
‘No, we grew apart but then I started feeling bad about her struggling to bring up Ruby on her own. I’m her only relative and I said she could move to be near me and work in this business I’ve got.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We supply vintage clothes and props for the theatre and TV companies.’
‘But she didn’t want to?’
‘No, she didn’t want any charity, which was nonsense because she would’ve had to earn her wages and not sit dreaming all day… but that’s always been her problem.’
‘What about Ruby’s father?’
‘Him? A one-night stand, never to be seen again.’
‘Hardly sounds like a happy home. Could Ruby just have run away or wandered off?’
‘No, I really don’t think so. She depends so much on her own routines which is why I know something’s happened to her.’
‘What are the police doing?’
‘Talking to the neighbours, doing the usual searches of lock-ups and empty building and there’s been some publicity in the local media.’
‘But nothing’s come of any of it?’
‘No, and when I ring, they just say they’ve no new developments to report.’
‘Then that must be the case. What does your husband think?’
‘Evan? No idea. He and I were divorced ages ago.’
McCall knew this already but had reason to feign ignorance.
‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘Don’t think I haven’t
noticed your by-line in the press over the years, Mac… and all those credits on serious TV programmes.’
‘But how does that help?’
‘Look, I know how the media works. Ruby isn’t the kind of cuddly, blonde-haired kid missing from suburbia that the papers would go big on every day. She’s a plain Jane from a grotty council estate with a weirdo mother so her disappearance isn’t getting the sort of coverage we need to keep what’s happened in the public mind.’
‘So you want me to try and put a piece together… a feature, something like that?’
‘That’d be terrific - and if someone prominent like you turns up asking questions, the police can’t just put Ruby’s case on the back burner.’
‘Have they dragged the reservoir yet?’
Lexie winced at this question, grimly logical though it was. She shook her head then unfolded a large sheet of paper from her shoulder bag and handed it to McCall. It was a minutely detailed pencil drawing of a huge stone castle, almost photographically reproduced with turrets, castellations, arrow-slit windows, studded oak doors and all perfectly reflected in a tree-lined lake.
‘What’s this?’
‘Another place the police have searched.’
‘I thought Ruby lives in north London not Scotland.’
‘So she does. This is a fake castle they built years ago to disguise the pumping station on the reservoir just around the corner from where Ruby lives and that’s where she always goes to act out her fantasies.’
‘And the police found nothing?’
‘No, but there’s something you need to know…. Ruby drew this picture.’
‘A child of ten did this?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true. She might be the weirdest kid you’ll ever meet but she’s incredibly gifted.’
‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘And she’ll have done it from memory.’
‘It’s astonishing. This alone would walk her story into any of the colour supplements.’
‘She only has to see something once, a building or a face, and she can go home and draw it.’
‘What an amazing talent. Shouldn’t she be at a special art school?’
‘You’d think so, but I doubt it’d happen.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Well, I’m sure Etta does her best but a pushy mum she isn’t. Life hasn’t been easy for her with Ruby so if she’s occupied drawing and pretending she’s a princess in a castle and has a pet unicorn, Etta gets a few hours peace but she can’t see beyond that.’
A colour supplement article was already forming in McCall’s head.
Six
Three days before McCall chanced upon Lexie filming her cough and spit of an appearance in “Inspector Morse”, a press conference about Ruby’s disappearance was held sixty miles away at Manor Hill police station.
Her mother made an emotional appeal for information. A twenty-second clip aired on regional BBC news that night. Lexie called in a favour from a props buyer in the drama department who wangled her a cassette of the uncut rushes from the film library. She’d brought it with her for McCall to see.
He now inserted it into his machine and they sat back to watch. From the look of dread in her eyes, Etta could have been facing a firing squad, not a thinly attended presser.
She walked uncertainly between a uniformed policewoman and a civilian press relations officer, almost as if she was in custody.
‘Hey, that PR guy, that’s Malky Hoare,’ McCall said. ‘I know him from Fleet Street days. Wicked old sod, couldn’t even lie straight in bed.’
Hoare’s amiable face seemed to overflow his tight blue collar. He was an alumnus of a minor fee-paying school which gave him a faux posh accent, a facility to recite lines of rote-learned poetry and a belief he was a wordsmith when under the influence.
Etta looked trapped. McCall immediately thought this suspiciously like policing as opposed to theatre, testing how a suspect performed under media lights and questions.
Hoare placed a photograph of Ruby on the desk in front of them and thanked the hacks for attending.
‘OK gents, you’ve got my briefing. This is Mrs Etta Ross, the mother of the little girl who’s been missing for three days now and she wants to make a personal appeal through you to get Ruby home where she belongs.’
Etta was attractive, not beautiful, small boned, late thirties and unlike her sister, had the fashion sense of an office temp - prim black skirt, white silky top, simple silver chain around her freckled neck.
The cameraman tightened from a wide three-shot to a single. Etta’s reddened eyes had done more weeping than sleeping. Her hands shook as if the prepared statement was a warrant for her execution.
‘My daughter is the world to me,’ she said.
Her voice trembled but gave no hint of its origins.
‘I… I just want her back… if you’re watching this, Ruby, you’re not in any trouble, darling, no one’s angry with you, honest they’re not.’
Whatever composure she had summoned up began to slip. The policewoman put an arm around her as Etta tried again.
‘I… just want you to come home or tell someone in the street who you are and ask them to find a police officer and then they’ll bring you home. I miss you so much, Ruby.
‘The flat isn’t the same without you… and if anyone out there knows where she is, please, please let her go.’
Then Etta pushed back her chair and ran out crying, hands over her face. The policewoman quickly followed. Hoare filled in by asking for questions. An uninterested local paper reporter wanted to know if Ruby had gone missing before.
‘No, and this is why the police are so worried about her.’
‘Could we be talking kidnap or murder?’
‘We’re not speculating on either at the moment. This remains a missing child inquiry and we’re doing all we can to find her alive and well.’
‘Is it true what the neighbours say, that this Ruby’s a bit of an oddball?’
‘Ruby has some behavioural, psychological problems’ Hoare said. ‘She sometimes finds it difficult to interact with people.’
‘So you’re saying she’s a nutter?’
At this, a man in a pale cotton jacket and jeans emerged from behind the camera and propelled the hack towards the door. The camera mic picked up his parting words.
‘Listen, sonny. Ruby’s a little kid in danger, so get on your bloody typewriter and help me find her.’
The screen went blank. McCall turned to Lexie.
‘Good for him - whoever he is.’
‘Believe it or not, he’s the detective in charge,’ Lexie said.
‘You mean you’ve met him?’
‘Yes, with Etta when Ruby first went missing. He’s called Benwick.’
‘But if he’s running the case, why didn’t he take the press conference?’
‘No idea but when I talked to him, he wasn’t like any cop I’ve ever known, a real charmer like one of those American cops on television.’
McCall would ring Hoare to line up an off-the-record briefing. Lexie could call Etta to arrange for him to meet her, too. He needed more examples of Ruby’s extraordinary drawings - and other photographs of her, too.
But if McCall felt himself morphing into a hack again, it wasn’t only Ruby’s face which hovered between him and redemption.
*
From her bedroom window, Etta Ross could make out the silhouette of the reservoir’s dominating castle, top lit by a rising full moon. It was not cold but she shook. Someone was walking up and down on her grave.
Candles shone behind the rocks of purple amethyst on her dressing table. Amethysts are said to promote clarity of thought but aid the passing of souls to the next world, too.
Her mind was a turmoil of regret and remorse, made no easier by the detective who’d just left. His smile couldn’t hide the menace behind his eyes. Those pictures he showed her… men w
ho didn’t know they were being photographed. She told him she’d not seen any of them before.
But she was lying. Mr Ginger was all too familiar.
Etta drew her heavy purple drapes to shut out the world beyond the window and to be alone in the place where only she had all the clues - and all the answers - for the truth was always in the tarot.
She sat before her reflection in the mirror and shuffled the pack. The first card she turned was the High Priestess. Such irony. Of all the 22 major arcana cards, Etta most identified with this one - the mysterious keeper of supernatural knowledge, sitting between pillars of light and dark, life and death. Only the High Priestess knew what was hidden behind the curtain - and how to keep it secret.
But any parallel with Etta ended there. Within the figure of the High Priestess was imprinted the legend of Persephone, abducted from a field of flowers and spirited into the underworld.
Persephone’s mother searched the earth to rescue the daughter she loved. But not until the goddess of witchcraft finally guided her to look in the land of the dead did she find where she had been taken - and would have spent the rest of eternity.
Etta threw all the cards on the floor. She lay face down on the scarlet covers of her empty bed, alone and in great distress.
There was no magic which might undo what she herself had brought about, no tears could wash away her wickedness, no deity help her through what lay ahead.
Seven
Everything about Detective Inspector Larry Benwick intrigued Hoare and stirred his tabloid curiosity. He was more Miami Vice than Inspector Morse, not yet forty and with an assured but anonymous face and fair hair long overdue a cut. Benwick could have been anyone but a hardly regular cop.
Hoare asked around the press office about him. Someone thought he’d recently returned from an overseas posting and had been parachuted into Manor Hill for the Ruby Ross job.
He managed to get a better steer from an anti terrorist contact in specialist operations. They’d met for a gargle in The Albert on Victoria Street where Scotland Yard’s officer class went range finding on each other’s weaknesses.
‘So, you gouty old reprobate, still glad you quit poaching to become a gamekeeper?’
The Convenience of Lies Page 3