Graham interjected, “What was the mood like, among those who were searching for Beth?”
Lyon sighed at length. “It was bleak. You know, Beth’s mother is absolutely convinced to this day that she is alive. But when you’re on a search like that, looking under piles of leaves, in burrows, and in ditches by the side of the road, you’re not expecting to come across Beth looking all rosy and healthy. We were expecting to find a body. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I think so,” Roach said.
“But there was absolutely no sign of her. I mean, we found some old clothing in a couple of places, but there was no reason to suspect it was Beth’s. I think that they even did DNA analysis or something, but she was wearing her school uniform when she went missing, and we never found anything like that.”
Graham pressed on. “How well did you know her?”
The question was very deliberate. It was calculated to provoke a response that might be very subtle indeed. Like a camera programmed to take shots in bursts of six or twelve, Graham watched Lyon’s reaction in slow motion. He took in every nuance of Lyon’s facial expression, every movement of his hands. How his eyes darted one way, then another, then skyward. How he licked his lips, which suddenly seemed dry. Perhaps only high-level negotiators, successful poker players, and police detectives shared this special skill; that remarkable ability to read a person’s reactions in the minutest detail.
“She was a student of mine for two years,” Lyon said. “But they were big classes, twenty-five or thirty kids in each.”
Roach waited and then said, “So, you wouldn’t say you were particularly close?”
Lyon suddenly glared at him. “Close?” he repeated. “What do you mean, close?” Lyon glanced at Graham, then back to Roach, his expression stern and offended. “What are you trying to imply?”
Roach softened his tone. “Nothing at all, sir. Just trying to establish how well she knew her teachers. How she got along at school.”
“And just because she was my student, you think…”
Graham jumped in. “No, he doesn’t think anything of the sort, and neither do I. Please don’t worry, Mr. Lyon. We have no reason to suspect anything improper of you.”
“I should think not,” Lyon replied tersely. “With all these new laws and students reporting every last thing, the situation has become ridiculous,” he said. “Just completely ridiculous. It was one of the reasons I got out of teaching.”
Graham made a note: Complaints against Lyon?
“I remember,” Roach said, “that you assigned a lot of homework.”
Lyon blinked at the abrupt shift of topic. “I mean, yes. We couldn’t possibly cover everything in class time, and the school used to make a great deal about exam results each year. If they didn’t improve, we got the Spanish Inquisition.”
“And do you remember Beth as someone who did her homework on time?”
Lyon shook his head. “I couldn’t say. Like I said, she was smart, and I know she wanted to go to college on the mainland somewhere, but that’s really all I remember.”
Graham’s attention moved around the room. He took in the DVD titles on the shelves, and then began surveying the photos sitting on the desk. Lyon featured in almost all of the photos. There was one of him kneeling at the center of a group of exhausted hikers, shrouded in mist at the peak of some unknown hilltop. He’d done a parachute jump at some point; there was the obligatory photo of him falling to earth, grinning at the camera with two thumbs up. And there was a pub photo, a table full of adults, smiling and raising glasses to the camera. Graham noted something and decided to ask about it.
“Do you still smoke, Mr. Lyon?” The house didn’t smell of it.
“Quit,” Lyon told him. “Four years ago. One of the hardest things I ever did.”
“Did you smoke a lot, back in the day?” Roach followed up.
“Oh yes,” Lyon admitted. “Pack-and-a-half a day for about ten years. Bloody filthy, I know, but it was just the best way to take a break in between classes. Helped when I was grading papers, too. Finally, I decided to clean up my act, and I feel all the better for it,” he smiled.
They learned that Lyon had left the teaching profession after fifteen years and had begun freelancing as a journalist, writing for blogs and contributing chapters to those such-and-such for dummies books on computers, security, viruses, and the like.
“It pays the mortgage, just about,” Lyon told them. “And I’m my own boss.”
They found out nothing more, and eventually Graham thanked Lyon and drew the interview to a close. He led Roach to the outer hall. This time, Graham noticed a painting on the wall of the dining room. It was a classic Pre-Raphaelite scene of two young women by a riverbank. Both were naked, with alabaster skin and blond curls.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Lyon,” Roach was saying, “If you think of anything else, please be sure to get in touch.” Lyon promised that he would and saw the two officers out.
On the drive back to the station, Graham and Roach silently considered the interview.
“What did you think, Roach?”
“I think he sounded a little too practiced, sir, but there was nothing concrete.”
“Hmm.”
“Do you think he’s a person of interest?” Roach asked.
“Don’t know yet, son,” Graham said, “but we’re going to find out.”
Later that afternoon, with Barnwell and Graham gone for the day, Janice was still at the front desk. Twenty feet away, Roach was working on his own search, one for which a computer was of little help. Given the use of Janice’s desk, he was hunched over Beth Ridley’s journal, reading and re-reading the neat handwriting. He had photocopied it, transcribed it, and made endless notes on what the strangely elusive text might mean.
“Okay,” he muttered to himself, as was his habit when engrossed in a task. “We’ve got six characters, all of them animals.” He counted them again. “Bug, Mouse, Puppy, Canary, Cuckoo, and Cat.” His pen tapped rhythmically on a legal pad. “An insect, three mammals and two birds. What does that tell me?”
It had been his most frequent question since first opening the journal. How could this seemingly innocent, rather childish collection of half-stories possibly connect to Beth’s disappearance?
“There’s no hero,” he observed quietly to himself, “but there’s at least one bad guy: Cat.” He circled the idea in his notes. “Cat is devious and scheming, always trying to take something that doesn’t belong to him. Definitely a villain.”
The journal repeatedly referenced Cat as “smelly” or “stinky.” Puppy, on the other hand, was well-meaning and loyal but rather naïve. “I wish Puppy would grow up,” Roach read from one of the last pages in the journal. And there, on the very last page, dated the day before Beth vanished: “Puppy doesn’t see the danger. She won’t tell anyone, but I think I have to.”
“What danger?” Roach asked himself.
Then, there was Canary, a flighty, unreliable character, and Cuckoo, who was selfish, taking things from others and calling them his own.
“Beth is never actually angry with Canary or Cuckoo,” Roach concluded. “But she doesn’t respect them at all.”
Mouse, on the other hand, was even more naïve and lost than Puppy. “Mouse gets eaten, but only because she chooses not to run away. Mouse is getting herself into trouble again. Cat loves it best when Mouse runs away, but only for a while. Then he chases, pounces, and Mouse is caught.”
“Beth, dear girl,” Roach whispered to the book, “what on earth are you talking about?”
The one element that did make sense was Beth’s references to a character she called “Bug.” “Bug is kind and thoughtful,” she wrote. “Bug cares about me.” And then, toward the end of the journal, “Bug & Beth?” The question was enclosed in a heart shape, shaded in with pink pencil.
It was the very strangest feeling to see his own nickname and his teenage self described in these pages. He sighed deeply, doing his bes
t to stand back from the deep personal connection he had with the case. He and Beth had been closer than he’d felt able to admit to DI Graham, although their friendship had never had the chance to become anything more. Reading Beth’s private thoughts made him feel deeply melancholy.
“Getting anywhere, Jim?” Harding asked from the doorway.
Roach snapped back to the present with a sudden jolt.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” Harding added, taking a seat opposite him.
“You need your desk back?” Roach asked, rubbing his eyes.
“It’s six-thirty, Jim. I’m headed home. I’m surprised you’re not on your way to practice by now.”
“Oh!” Roach said, suddenly, noticing the clock. “Oh, shoot! Is it Monday?”
“It’s been Monday all day.”
Roach rose from the desk quickly and stumbled around, finding his soccer bag under the reception desk and apologizing before dashing out of the door. He was trying to secure a regular starting place in the Jersey Police five-a-side squad. They were defending the championship title, and the coach would make him do extra push-ups if he were late.
Once he was gone, Janice closed out her own workday by logging off and checking around the office. “Are you cracking the Da Vinci Code or something here, Detective Roach?” she observed dryly to herself as she perused the desk Roach had been working at. She tidied up Jim’s notes and placed them in a manila folder. “Good for you, lad.”
She turned out the station’s lights and locked up. Barnwell would be on call tonight in case of emergencies. Janice tossed her bag into the back seat of her MG and started the car. She felt not a little lonely as she considered the evening ahead of her. “A girl like me,” she reflected as she backed out of the station’s small parking lot, “should be on her way to a hot date.”
The car roared reassuringly as she found first gear and gave it some gas.
“Yeah, right. Dream on, Janice.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ONLY CALLS Barnwell usually received in the middle of the night were dire emergencies, burglaries, or crank calls from bored people who couldn’t sleep. At daybreak, though, he was often informed of crimes that had happened overnight and were only now becoming apparent. The call from Captain Smith was just such a report.
“Good morning,” Barnwell said, locking up his bike.
“I wish it were a better one,” Smith replied, stepping off his boat and approaching Barnwell. “And I wish I still had my searchlight, too.”
The boat owner showed Barnwell bright, new scratch marks on the light’s mounting, which was empty now but still bolted to the outside of the pilot house.
Barnwell started making notes. “You know, I was only down here yesterday. You’re certain it was here last night?”
Smith stared at him as though Barnwell had suggested the experienced fisherman might have forgotten how many limbs he had or possibly the names of his children. “Certain as Christmas,” Smith replied. “Some bugger came along with a screwdriver and half-inched the damned thing. None too neatly, neither.”
Des Smith was another weather-beaten old salt, even more leathery than the older Captain Drake. The two had been in a good-natured, decades-long competition, plying the unpredictable seas in a bid to consistently bring home a larger catch than the other. Smith’s crew was a mix of younger men, including several sons of retired captains, and a couple of old-timers who had a few years left in them. As Barnwell approached him, he could see that Smith was dressed in a woolen sweater, fisherman’s overalls, and was smoking a battered pipe, the very image of the Ancient Mariner.
“There’s been a rash of these thefts,” Barnwell told him. “Captain Drake’s GPS yesterday, and now…”
“I know that, lad!” Smith exclaimed. “What I want to know is this, how can it happen here, night after night? This is why we need some kind of protection, dammit.”
Security at the marina was a topic of contention. Gorey Police were woefully understaffed for such a task, while the consortium who owned the marina had imposed cutbacks after three straight years of financial losses. The first thing to go had been private security. They hardly saw the point in spending money to protect a dozen boats whose best days were long behind them. In response, the boat owners had withheld their dues and threatened legal action, leading to an unhelpful standoff.
Barnwell closed his notebook after taking Smith’s statement. “We’ll do what we can,” Barnwell promised. “I can’t be certain that these thefts are related, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”
This didn’t impress the veteran fisherman. “We need to bring back public pillory,” Smith announced. “Stick ‘em in the stocks in the middle of the market square and throw bad eggs at ‘em. See what happens to the crime rate then!”
“I’ll take that under advisement, Captain. In the meantime, you and the other boat owners might think about organizing a watch at night, just in case.”
Just as Drake had done, Smith grumbled something profane and returned to his boat.
Barnwell jumped back on his bike and headed to the station, but as he cycled away, he was struck by a thought.
“Oh, hell.” He turned the bike around and peddled straight back to the harbor.
“You caught him already, then?” Smith hollered as Barnwell approached.
“On second thought,” Barnwell explained, “I’ll stand watch tonight.” The reception desk phone would be forwarded to him if he pressed the right buttons. “I’d like the thief arrested, not chopped into fish bait.”
“Right y’are,” Smith replied and smiled, revealing teeth Barnwell considered he wouldn’t want in his own mouth. “Good luck with catching the bugger.”
Back at the station, Sergeant Janice Harding was patrolling cyberspace on the hunt for Andrew Lyon. His employment history came up easily enough, largely due to the standard Criminal Records Bureau checks that were a requirement for teachers. She read through his credit history and found the dates of two property purchases. He lived in one home while leasing the other to a young family on the island. No complaints or incidents were on record for either, so she moved on.
The IP address relating to his home was listed on several Internet business databases, and it was straightforward enough to track down which websites he worked on. And that was when she began taking very detailed notes. Twenty minutes later, she called Graham.
“I’m on my way to the school, Sergeant,” the DI explained. “What’s new there?”
“Well, sir, I’ve been investigating Mr. Lyon, like you asked.”
“Yes, good,” Graham said, the noise of the car’s engine rumbling in the background. “Anything interesting?”
Janice cleared her throat. “Interesting is one way of describing it, sir.”
“Oh?”
“Well, put it this way. Once I’m finished with this, I’m going to take a long, hot shower.”
“Ah,” Graham said. “I did wonder if our Mr. Lyon might have a tendency toward the… how shall we say…”
“Prurient?” Janice tried.
“Well, you tell me,” Graham replied.
“Not on the phone,” Janice decided. “I’ll give you as graphic a rundown as you can handle once you’re back at the station.”
“Understood, Sergeant.”
Roach was doing the driving, and his curiosity was piqued. “So, Mr. Lyon’s a pervert?”
Graham winced. “Picture a cart,” he said patiently, “and now a horse. There is only one proper order for those two things, wouldn’t you agree, Constable?”
“I would, sir. It’s just that… well… I thought there was something not quite right about him.”
Graham sighed. “It takes a lot more than a thought, Constable.”
“Yes, but…”
“And, these days especially, it’s a hell of an accusation to throw around. You know how many teachers have found their careers ruined because one of their students even suggested some kind of impropriety?”
“Too many,” Roach agreed. “But how many students have been suffering in silence because they thought no one would believe them?”
“Difficult,” Graham admitted.
They were reaching Gorey Grammar, the school Beth and Roach had attended. It was housed in a neat Edwardian building surrounded by well-kept playing fields. A game of field hockey was underway, and they could hear the coach’s encouragement booming across the open space.
“Schools should be the safest environments we can make them,” Graham was telling Roach as they got out of the car and crunched across the gravel toward the school’s impressive entrance. “But it’s misleading to call someone a ‘pervert,’ just as much as it is to call them a ‘criminal.’ You can’t boil a complex human being down to a single word. Still less should that single word define your view of them or how they’re treated by the law.”
“Interesting point, sir,” Roach conceded.
Jim had climbed the steps before him hundreds of times as a teen, and being at the school once again was making him feel nostalgic.
“Anyway, you’re an alumnus, so you can do the talking,” Graham offered.
“Thank you, sir. But I don’t know how much they’ll be able to tell us, this far removed.”
They were greeted in the lobby by the head teacher, Liam Grant. He was almost impossibly tall, a thin beanpole of a man, pleasant but reserved, with a broad Irish accent. He didn’t appear overly thrilled to have police officers on the premises, especially when one of them was in uniform, but he was friendly enough.
After Roach had made the introductions, Graham asked Grant, “Were you head of the school when Beth was here?”
“Oh no, I was a wet-behind-the-ears English teacher back then. Straight out of teacher training. I had no contact with Beth.”
Graham nodded.
“But I’ve asked Mrs. Wallace to talk to you. She’s our school librarian and been here for nearly twenty years. The library is this way,” Grant said, keen to escort the two investigators through the echoing hallways before the end of class.
The Case of the Broken Doll (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 4) Page 4