“The place will be thick with students in a few moments, but they don’t tend to spend their break at the library, so it will be quiet in there.”
Roach was hit by a wave of memories as the three men walked down the corridors. They still had polished, wooden floors and rows of battered lockers opposite each classroom. He thought back to his old school friends, teasing each other, laughing about last night’s TV, worrying together about exams.
They passed the classroom in which Jim had spent a whole year. He struggled to remember any more than five or six faces from that young crowd of twenty-five who had been as close to him as family back then. Simon, Susan, Paula… What was the name of the little spindly kid? Ah, yes. Brian “Shady” Sycamore. Wonder whatever happened to him?
Somewhere in those memories was Beth, but at that moment, all he could picture was the brightness of her blond hair with the sun behind her through the window.
Very little about the school seemed to have changed, until he saw the library.
“This used to be like the reading room of a monastery,” Roach observed aloud. “And now it’s more like the deck of the Starship Enterprise.” Rows of computers occupied most of the library’s old, wooden tables. But it still had that quiet, restrained air. The shelves of books stretching back into the depths of the spacious room felt very familiar. As they entered, two boys who had been poring over a large book at one of the tables seemed to take this as their cue to leave. They closed the book and left it on the table as they headed out.
“Funny you should say that, Constable,” Mr. Grant noted as the two young men filed quietly past him. “This used to be the school’s chapel, until the need for a library became sufficiently great. Now, the books are being usurped by computers and handheld devices, but it still retains that calm, other-worldly atmosphere, don’t you think?
“Anyhow as I said, I’m really not sure how helpful we can be, but Mrs. Wallace was here when Beth went missing. As the librarian, she gets to know just about all the students. You’re welcome to look around as much as you need to.”
Grant left them in the company of the librarian whom Roach remembered from his time at the school.
“Things have changed, Mrs. Wallace,” Roach said.
“Indeed they have.” Mrs. Wallace turned to explain for Graham’s benefit.
“Back in 2005, we only had two computers, and only one of those was connected to the Internet. The number of times I had to dash over to remind the groups to share the mouse…”
Roach chuckled at a memory. “Good times.”
“Beth usually sat here,” she said, indicating a table by the window. The view from there was over the largest of the playing fields and the woods beyond. “She didn’t care for the computers. Worked from her class textbooks or others she took from the shelves.”
“Did she come to the library alone, Mrs. Wallace?” Graham asked.
“It varied. Sometimes alone, sometimes with her friend, Susan Miller. They would sit side by side. Susan would usually leave before Beth, but Beth always stayed on until we closed.”
“What time was that?”
“Five o’clock. Beth was always the last to leave.”
“Did she talk to anyone while she was here?”
“No, I remember her as being very focused on her work.”
“Were you involved in the search for her, Mrs. Wallace?” Graham asked.
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “Terrible thing. Only time in my life I can remember when success would have meant disaster.”
Roach was nodding. “Do you recall anything from that time that might help?”
Mrs. Wallace paused and cleaned the glasses that hung from a chain around her neck.
“You know,” she said, “we all speculated about her. Probably a terrible thing to do, but with no witnesses or evidence, we were bound to start guessing. I remember thinking to myself that she might have been keeping a secret. Something she couldn’t tell anyone.”
“What kind of secret might that have been?”
But Mrs. Wallace wouldn’t be drawn out. “Speculation,” she repeated. “Just trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.”
“Please, Mrs. Wallace,” Graham said. “We don’t mind a little guesswork from time to time.”
The old librarian leaned in close. “I think there was a boy, you see. Someone who wasn’t at this school. And I’ve had it in my head ever since…” she said. “Oh, I know it’s the silliest thing, but I just have the feeling that she’d got herself into trouble. You know, couldn’t tell a soul. I think that they went away together, her and the boy, had the baby, and now are living out their lives, unable to return.” She told her version of events in a rapid, hushed whisper.
Roach, who had stiffened at the librarian’s hypothesis, thanked her. After confirming that this was all Mrs. Wallace could offer them, he escorted Graham out to the playing fields. “Interesting idea, but I wouldn’t put it at the top of our list,” Roach said.
“Agreed, Constable.”
“It’s a cliché, sir, I know, but…”
“She ‘wasn’t that type of girl?’” Graham guessed. Through the recollections of others, the family photos at the Ridley’s house, and Beth’s own belongings, he was building a picture of a girl who was seldom caught on the wrong side of the rules.
“Not even a little bit,” Roach confirmed. “She really didn’t have a reputation for being too friendly with the boys. In fact, we were all a little in awe of her.”
“Smart, capable females are terrifying to teenage boys,” Graham said. “Grown up boys, for that matter,” he added. “I think you’re right that Mrs. Wallace is being a little too creative. Been reading too many of those romance novels, I reckon.”
They walked back into the school building. Classes had restarted, and they were surrounded by the all-too-familiar sounds of education: teachers calling names, chairs scraping hard floors, the clattering of students pulling books from their school bags.
“Amazing how little things change,” Roach said.
They went outside and as they reached their unmarked police car, Graham brought out his notepad for a final update.
“So, what’s next, sir?”
Graham spent a moment in thought, and then something seemed to click in his mind. “Hang on a minute. We’ve been idiots.”
“Have we?” Roach asked, surprised.
“Come with me, lad. I can’t believe this, but we’ve ignored the most priceless source of information at any school.”
“What?”
“Not what. Who.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
GRAHAM KNOCKED ON Mr. Grant’s office door and soon discovered that his thought was correct. “Of course,” Grant confirmed. “Couldn’t run the place without Mrs. Gates. Her office is right next door, actually. This way.”
Roach gave his boss a puzzled look. “Old Mrs. Gates is going to be our star witness?” he whispered.
“What makes you doubt that?” Graham asked as Grant knocked on the school secretary’s door.
“Well, she was about two hundred years old when I was here, back in the day. I don’t know if she’ll even…”
“Constable, have you ever known a school that didn’t have a long-serving school secretary who knew everything about the place?”
Mrs. Gates was closing in on retirement, an event that would clearly precipitate a giant upheaval for the school. Aged sixty-three, and possessed of an institutional knowledge that stretched back to the nineteen seventies, Mrs. Gates had an encyclopedic knowledge of staff and students. “Well, goodness, of course I remember Beth,” she said. “Bright, full of energy and talent. The Lord only knows what happened to her.”
“Well,” Graham said as they took seats in her small but highly organized office, “that’s why we’re here. I’d like to find out as much as we can about Beth’s time at the school.”
Mrs. Gates nodded for a moment and then pushed back from the desk to unlock a filing cabinet in the corner.
“Every year,” she said, flicking through a drawer crammed with manila folders, “they inform me that these records are going to be put on the computer. And every year, we find another excellent reason to leave a perfectly good system well alone. Aha,” she said, pulling out a slender folder.
“Another thin file,” Graham muttered to Roach. “Just once, I’d like something the size of a phonebook.”
“Elizabeth Victoria Ridley,” Mrs. Gates announced. She handed over the folder.
“Good grades,” Graham noted. “A after A, with the occasional A-minus.”
“Damn near perfect attendance,” Roach added. Then he lowered his voice. “Doesn’t sound like the kind of girl who’d get herself ‘in trouble,’ does she?”
Graham was nodding, memorizing the file. “She had Mr. Lyon for two years in a row,” Graham noted.
“Nothing unusual about that. The science courses are a full year long,” Mrs. Gates told him.
“True,” Roach recalled. “And a long year, it was too. And I still couldn’t tell you why the moon has phases or why the sea is salty.”
“That’s because you were too obsessed with sport to pay proper attention,” Mrs. Gates reminded him.
Roach blinked. “That was ten years ago!” he marveled. “How could you possibly…”
But Mrs. Gates simply tapped her temple and smiled.
“Told you, didn’t I?” Graham muttered. “Mrs. Gates,” he said, turning back to her, “I wonder if the school still has records of which teacher was on duty in the library after school? I’m assuming that was the practice?”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Gates confirmed, making a beeline for another filing cabinet behind her desk. “Especially after we got the new computers. And there was that incident with the Year 11 boys.”
“Incident?” Roach asked. Then, the memory suddenly came to him. “Oh yes, I know what you mean…”
“Terrible,” was all Mrs. Gates would say.
Roach had a smirk on his face. “I only ever heard the rumors, sir, but it seems that a group of senior boys decided to have a poetry session at the very back of the library after school one day.”
Graham raised an eyebrow. “A poetry session, Constable? Sounds a little unlikely.”
“Well, this was Jamaican poetry, sir. With, erm, appropriate herbal accompaniment.”
Graham stifled a laugh.
“Stank to high heaven!” Mrs. Gates complained. “Mrs. Wallace said it was like walking into a Rastafarian commune. Took us days to get the smell out.”
She finally located another folder and handed it to Graham. “Here. Teachers still volunteer for library duty. It means that they’re exempt from morning assembly or some other odious task. Back then, though, there was overtime allocated to it. If they needed a bit of extra money, teachers could sit in the library, overseeing the students while doing some grading or class prep.”
Graham scanned the document quickly, unsurprised to see one name reappearing throughout 2004 and 2005. “Mr. Lyon seems to have done more than his fair share of library duty,” Graham noted. “He was there at least once a week, sometimes twice.”
“He was always angling for more money. His dream was to be his own boss. I don’t want to tell tales, but I know he wasn’t the greatest fan of our head at the time.”
“Who was that?” Graham asked.
“Mr. Bellevue.”
“Is he still around?”
“Only in the cemetery. He died of a heart attack the Christmas after Beth disappeared. I always liked him myself, but he and Mr. Lyon had professional differences. Mr. Bellevue expected a very special level of dedication from his teachers. Andrew was forever getting himself distracted by some plan to get rich. He liked to buy property and lease it.”
Graham wrote all this down. “The original folders say there was no record of Beth being at school that day. Can you confirm that?”
“I can. She wasn’t present for any of her classes.” Mrs. Wallace, seemingly from memory, pulled out the attendance registers for each of the classes Beth had had that day. There was an “X” next to her name in each one.
“Well, thank you, Mrs. Gates. I think we have all we need for now, you’ve been very helpful,” Graham brought the interview to a close.
Roach followed his boss back to the car. “So,” he summarized as they got in and the car rolled slowly along the school’s driveway, “there’s no evidence that she made it to school on that morning. Everything points to the fact that she disappeared off the street on her way here.”
“Yup, that is the logical conclusion,” Graham agreed.
“But Lyon pulled a lot of extra library duty. To save up for a second house, do you think?”
“Or for some other reason, perhaps,” Graham agreed.
“He did give a heck of a lot of homework,” Roach pointed out.
“Knowing full well,” Graham said, “that Beth and others would spend time in the library.”
“Right where he would be.” The thought was an uncomfortable one. “Is it a bit less presumptuous of me now,” Roach asked, “to call Mr. Lyon just a little creepy?”
Graham drove them back at a slow, steady pace, deep in thought. Finally, he said, “I’m reluctant, Constable, really I am. He could have given a lot of homework precisely so he’d get the overtime to buy his second home or whatever his current scheme was. Or there could be no ulterior motive at all. We are speculating again. Where’s the evidence?”
Roach looked at him, skepticism written all over his face.
“It’s possible,” Graham finally conceded. “But let’s see what Sergeant Harding has got for us.”
CHAPTER NINE
JANICE WAS DRINKING a cup of tea when they got back. “Barnwell’s at the marina again,” she explained, “so I’m holding the fort.”
She pulled a face.
“How’s it going?” Graham asked, taking off his long coat and hanging it up behind his office door.
“Well, sir, put it this way. If things were different, and I worked for a company where the bosses check their employees’ browser history, I’d be in big trouble right now.”
Graham pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Okay,” he said, “Roach, would you cover the desk? Sergeant Harding, let’s use your laptop. I don’t want these things in my browser history.”
He waved her into his office. “Roach, check in with Barnwell and see that he hasn’t fallen into the harbor or something.”
Harding pulled up a chair and turned the screen so that it faced away from the door. “Okay. I hope you’re ready for this.”
Graham brought out his notebook. “Roach is certain there’s something not quite on the up-and-up with Lyon,” he reported.
“Well, sir, I tend to agree with him. I’ve turned up a whole lot of information about Mr. Lyon that would support his conclusion. The annoying thing about it, though,” Harding told him, pulling up her research on the laptop, “is that it’s all circumstantial. He’s definitely creepy, no doubt whatsoever about that. But I can’t prove that the filthy man has actually broken any laws.”
“How do you mean?”
“Exhibit A,” Janice said. She brought up a website. “The street address for this is in Denmark. Lyon has worked for these people for about three years. He designed their payment system, the front-end, and their shipping and tracking software.”
“What do they do?” Graham asked, but as he clicked through the site, it became abundantly clear. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“High-end, luxury bondage gear,” Janice said, somehow managing to keep a straight face. “Whips, chains, you name it.”
“I’d prefer not to dignify it with a name,” Graham said. “Not my cup of tea, Janice, but I don’t think it’s against the law. What else have you got?”
“Well, there’s this thoughtful group of contemporary artists,” Janice said, clicking a bookmark that brought up a website dedicated to an “adult videographers’ collective.” I haven’t downloaded a
nything, but the thumbnails might clue you in.”
Graham peered a little closer and then wished he hadn’t. “Legal?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Janice replied. “All the required language is there at the bottom of every screen. Everyone’s eighteen or over, pursuant to this section of that law, so on and so forth. As far as I can tell, the site is kosher, both in Denmark and in the UK. Which is a shame,” she added, “because Lyon built almost all of it.”
There were three other sites on similar themes, but nothing about them suggested that laws were being broken. “Immoral, arguably, but sadly not illegal,” Janice concluded. “Mr. Lyon remains decidedly creepy, but we don’t have a case against him.”
“Not yet,” Graham said ominously.
Janice frowned. “Sir, I’ve done a pretty thorough search here. Everything on the database is—”
“There’s more,” Graham interrupted. “I’m sure of it. But it won’t be easy to get. When we do, I have a feeling it will be a great deal more than circumstantial.”
He reached for the phone. “And I know just how we can get it.”
Barnwell sighed heavily. He had come to detest riding around on the bike, however good for the environment or his own health it might be. There was something laughable about it, something weak and childish. He always felt overweight and uncoordinated on the damned thing, even after losing ten pounds in the last couple of months. He felt sure that one of these days, he’d crash into someone or tip himself into the harbor like an idiot.
As it was, the traditional modes of police transport – the horse, the patrol car and, most dynamic of all, the motorcycle – carried a note of authority. His bicycle simply announced the fact that Jersey police were underfunded and couldn’t afford a second car for the Gorey force.
He locked up the bike, mopped his brow, and headed into a shop. Immediately adjacent to the harbor were a group of businesses that catered to professional fishermen and day anglers, as well as pleasure boat owners and scuba types.
“Afternoon,” Barnwell said. “Is Mr. Foley in?
The Case of the Broken Doll (An Inspector David Graham Cozy Mystery Book 4) Page 5