by Dan Kavanagh
Whether or not they yet had a missing female on their hands was a matter on which D/S Vine was currently suspending judgement. People went off on long walks sometimes, and just forgot what time it was. People had rows. People played hard to get. People played that old game of Miss Me, Miss Me. This particular female didn’t even live at this particular address, and the inhabitants of this particular address — who looked a pretty strange crew, not just because they’d been up all night — hadn’t even checked Miss Angela Bruton’s home address. Well, they said they’d telephoned, but there was no reply, and since her car was still at the Hall and she wasn’t known as a walker, they’d assumed … That was the trouble with the public, they always did assume. So Detective-Sergeant Vine and Constable Willey and the lady in question’s fiancé drove round to the cottage. They knocked a bit, then quizzed the neighbours and finally pushed in a back window. No, after you, Constable. Constables and children first, I always say.
But she wasn’t there and by late morning it had been established securely enough in D/S Vine’s mind that the woman in question was, as they said, of a nervous disposition, which translated into normal language meant that she was barking mad and liable to top herself at any minute. So at about half-past eleven on an otherwise very pleasant morning the police frogman lowered himself into the lake and D/S Vine began the boring task of taking statements from the household; statements which, he knew from experience, would express either complete surprise at the fact that Miss Angela Bruton had gone missing, or else complete surprise that she hadn’t gone missing a lot earlier.
It was while he was interviewing the Filipino woman, who kept clutching at her throat and going on about some spoons or other which the Detective-Sergeant wasn’t the slightest bit interested in, that a short fellow with a broad face and a grown-out brush-cut came into the room.
‘Later, sir, if you don’t mind.’
‘Duffy, West End Central. Used to be, anyway. Freelance.’
‘Put in your six-penn’orth.’
The intruder nodded at the Filipino woman, who was dismissed. Duffy was cross with himself for not having thought of it earlier. He hadn’t because it was a possibility which implied a gloomy view of human nature. But that was exactly the view he had been trained to take — which was why he was now cross with himself.
D/S Vine put his head round the door and told Constable Willey, who was standing outside, to make sure everyone waited their turn in the family room, and not to let anyone into the video library, where he was conducting his interviews. Then he and Duffy slipped out through the french windows, one of which was still to be mended, and crossed the terrace.
Vine, a plumpish young man with sandy hair and a dark moustache, was obviously much more at home in the woods than Duffy was ever likely to be. Silently, they followed the path as it rose through the thickening bracken. This time, Duffy knew where the nick in the beech would be and instantly turned left. He didn’t need to walk past the hide before turning back to spot it. This time he simply cut his way firmly down a nettled slope until he and D/S Vine came out opposite the low entrance to the camp. What they saw made them break into a run.
She was lying on her front on a piece of tarpaulin with a brown-paper bag over her head. Her wrists were tied together behind her back and her ankles were roped as well. To ensure that she couldn’t turn over, each elbow was lashed to a short stake like a tent peg which had been hammered into the ground. She made a noise in her throat as they approached, which at least allayed their most obvious fear. Their next most obvious fear was not allayed: her skirt had been pulled up over her back, and her tights pulled down to her knees, leaving her naked from waist to lower thigh.
‘It’s all right. You’re all right, we’ve found you. It’s OK. It’s Duffy. We’ve found you.’ It didn’t matter much what you said, you just have to say it in the right tone. Duffy babbled, and alongside him D/S Vine also babbled, two streams of meaningless comfort as they undid the loose piece of string holding the brown-paper bag in place, then unfastened the gag and the blindfold and cut away the ropes. She sat blinking for some time, and the two men rubbed at her wrists, then she sat up, which made her skirt fall back into place, and when Duffy whispered, ‘Pull your tights up, love,’ she did as she was told. But she didn’t look at either of them, and she didn’t reply when D/S Vine asked her gently if she knew who’d done this to her.
They helped her to her feet and she stood there wobbling like some new-born animal. Then after the detective-sergeant had taken a good first look round Jimmy’s camp the three of them set off down the path. At first Duffy tried holding Angela round the waist, but she didn’t want that; then he tried taking her arm, but even this amount of physical contact seemed unacceptable; so they came through the wood in single file, with Angela silent between the two men. At one point she began shivering, but as soon as D/S Vine touched her shoulder from behind, she stopped.
They came out of the light bracken and made their way across the lawn towards the house. There was at first only one face at the large picture window in the family room, then there were several. One of these suddenly broke away, and a few seconds later the kitchen door was thrown open. Duffy and D/S Vine, more baffled than curious, watched as Jimmy ran across the terrace, down the steps, across the lawn and hurled himself straight into the lake. As there was a police frogman on duty there at the time, it proved easy enough to arrest him.
Duffy joined the others in the family room. They would all now have to wait longer to be interviewed. Priorities had changed. D/S Vine would be back probably the following day, but in the meantime no one was to leave, right? ‘What about calls of nature, Sergeant,’ asked Damian. ‘I don’t think this is a time for levity, sir,’ replied Vine.
They let Jimmy change into some dry clothes, but he still looked damp and wretched as they took him away. Angela followed in Mrs Vic Crowther’s red MG, driven by Belinda. Going off to be interviewed about kidnapping and rape in a red MG with the hood down, driven by former model Belinda Blessing, didn’t look or sound quite right to Duffy. He knew who it would sound pretty good to: the tabloids.
‘We’re going to have a problem with the papers,’ said Duffy. ‘They’re going to love this one.’ Big house in the country, missing girl, posh people, ex-Page-Three girl, rape, the old villain — sorry, local businessman - Vic, the young villain Taffy; all they needed was sex and drugs, which they could probably find without even needing to use a telephoto lens, and they were well away. Every neighbour interviewed, every speculation indulged. It would keep all those what-is-the-country-coming-to? columnists happy for weeks.
‘Yeah, well, I might be able to hold it off for a day or two,’ said Vic, and left the room.
There was a silence. Somehow, Duffy expected the first direct question to come from Lucretia. He was right. ‘How did you know where to go?’
‘What, the camp?’ It was easier to lie with Vic out of the room. ‘Oh, Jimmy told me about it. Roughly. It wasn’t too hard to find.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. Why did you think it was Jimmy?’
‘I wasn’t particularly thinking it was Jimmy. I was just thinking of places she might be. I suppose you could call it a hunch,’ he added, using the professional term.
‘Do you think Jimmy did it?’
‘Well,’ said Duffy. He wasn’t sure whether it was tactically better to be fair or unfair to Jimmy. ‘We don’t know what anyone “did” yet. Angela didn’t say anything on the way down, so we’re just assuming. I mean, it looked like something had happened, I have to admit that.’ It could only have looked more like something had happened, Duffy admitted to himself, if they’d actually caught the fellow still zipping up his fly. ‘And Vine did have a poke around when we were up there. Jimmy had these tins. With things in.’ He looked at Henry as he said the next bit. ‘There was an engagement photo of you and Angela, from the paper. It had burns all over it. Like it had been done with a cigarette.’
Henry didn’t reply. Duffy
went on. ‘The funny thing was, he hadn’t just put burns all over your face, he’d done it to Angela’s as well.’
Henry wafted his hand from side to side in disbelief. ‘I don’t understand any of it.’
‘Come on, Henry,’ said Lucretia. ‘It’s called jealousy.’
‘He never told me he was jealous of me.’ Henry made this sound like a full answer to the problem. He took his floppy handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose loudly.
‘They don’t,’ Lucretia explained. ‘They don’t. That’s the point about it.’
‘But I didn’t steal her from him. He’s a … he’s a … friend.’ There obviously wasn’t a nearer word Henry could lay his hands on.
‘Henry, everyone stole her from him.’ Lucretia’s emphasis made Damian chuckle; a response which irritated her. ‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean everyone had more chance with her than Jimmy. The milkman had more chance with her.’
‘The milkman has more chance with everybody, I’d say,’ smirked Damian.
‘So I just happened to be the one at the time? But why didn’t he do something to me if he was soft on Ange?’
‘Maybe that’s the point,’ said Lucretia. ‘It could have been you, it could have been anyone, if not quite the milkman. But it was always going to be her. There was always going to be Ange around. I suppose poor old Jimmy couldn’t take it any more.’
‘Poor old Jimmy,’ Sally mimicked crossly. ‘What about poor old bloody Ange?’
‘He had been behaving a bit oddly lately, I suppose,’ said Henry.
Lucretia demurred. ‘No odder than usual I’d have thought.’
‘What was he doing in that frogman’s suit yesterday? Everyone saw him, but from what you say he was going on as if he was the Invisible Man.’
‘He was looking for Ricky,’ said Duffy.
‘Looking for Ricky? That was a bit potty, wasn’t it?’
Duffy shrugged. He didn’t feel he’d confess who’d put Jimmy up to it. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem so strange to me. If you’re soft on someone, you probably think their dog needs a decent burial.’
‘Yes, old Jimmy would be just like that,’ Damian spotted a chance to annoy. ‘I can just see him saluting on some rain-swept hillside with the Last Post on a bugle and a damp little headstone. Ricky: He Barked His Last.’
Henry cleared his throat. ‘One of these days, Damian, someone’s going to thump you.’
‘If only they would,’ sighed Damian, ‘if only they would.’ Henry moved approximately a foot closer to Damian, whereupon the latter yelped and jumped over the back of the sofa. ‘I didn’t mean it. Nice dog. Nice doggie. Woof, woof.’ Sally giggled, and Vic’s return to the room was fortunately timed.
‘They’ll do what they can,’ he said, making Duffy wonder if the local papers up here also described Vic as a ‘local businessman’, and if so what they thought his business was. ‘At the moment the coppers can say there’s no story because they don’t know that any offence has been committed.’ Sure, thought Duffy, long-term open-air bondage is all the rage among posh people nowadays.
‘What about a couple of frames before lunch?’ Damian suggested.
‘I think I’ve been up all night,’ said Duffy.
‘About those cigarette burns on the photo,’ said Lucretia. ‘Jimmy doesn’t smoke. And another thing I don’t understand.’ Duffy rather wished Lucretia would shut up. No one else seemed to be thinking at the moment, which suited him fine. ‘If Jimmy killed Ricky, why was he looking for the body?’
‘Because he’s potty.’ This was Henry’s suggestion.
‘No, no, my dear Watson,’ said Damian. ‘Don’t you see, he did it to throw suspicion off himself. Who would ever suspect he was the murderer if he was the one that found the body?’
‘Brill,’ sighed Sally in genuine admiration.
‘Only one thing wrong.’ It was Lucretia with another correction. ‘He didn’t find it. The body. If he’d hidden it, you’d think even Jimmy would know where to look.’
‘Maybe it’s not helping anyone, going over things like this,’ Vic suggested. ‘Why don’t we break it up and have a spot of lunch?’
The women and Damian led the way. Duffy turned to Henry. ‘Have you still got your Dad’s billiard table?’
‘Of course.’
‘Look, say if you think this is a bit silly, but if I’m stuck down here for a couple of days, what about you giving me a couple of lessons, secret, you know. Then I could really take that Damian apart.’
Henry grinned, looked serious for a bit, then grinned again. ‘Well, I suppose it depends on Mother a bit. And Ange. But I’d like to.’
‘Then you wouldn’t have to thump him.’
‘But I quite want to thump him.’
‘So do I. But I wouldn’t mind thumping him with a side-bet.’
Despite Vic’s suggestion that going over it all wouldn’t help things, there seemed nothing else to talk about. Henry’s presence inhibited some of the preciser speculations on what might have been done to his fiancée, but the character and career of her assailant were thoroughly examined. Jimmy’s professional reputation as an estate agent was confirmed as not being of the highest; in fact, no one had ever known him sell a house. His less than moderate success with women was apparently known through two counties. His mother had died young, and his father had pushed him hard. He’d really enjoyed the Army, but the Army hadn’t enjoyed him. He was a loser, a wimp-out, and at thirty-five it had all just got too much for him.
‘There’s something else I don’t understand,’ said Lucretia. Shut up, shut up. ‘If Jimmy was clever enough to start fishing for Ricky’s body to put us all off the scent, why was he so stupid as to run away when the police brought Ange down from his camp?’
‘Because he’s potty,’ said Henry.
‘Ah.’ Lucretia had aimed the question at Damian, who briefly got going. ‘The psyche of the criminal is indeed a Hampton Court maze. But perhaps … My dear Taffy?’ Damian lobbed the question on to the man in black with the triangular torso.
‘Well,’ Taffy began. ‘He looked as if he was running away, didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ various people replied with various emphases.
‘I’ve been reading up on this, you see. Sometimes, the psychologists say, running away isn’t what it looks like. Running away isn’t running away, you see. Running away is really wanting to be caught.’
‘Isn’t it easier to stay where you are if you want to be caught?’ Lucretia swept her blonde hair off the side of her face in a manner which implied polite scepticism, if not that Taffy was the biggest fucking fool she’d listened to for some time.
‘No, not necessarily. There has to be a moment of symbolic fugue followed by symbolic reintegration into society.’
‘You mean running away and getting arrested?’
‘If you want to use the layman’s terms. You see, the offender isn’t any different from most of us round this table.’ Well, he isn’t any different from you, thought Duffy. ‘The offender is always seeking his place in society. It’s just that he sometimes uses unusual methods.’ Like hitting people with iron bars. ‘But what he’s seeking is reintegration, or rather the integration he never had in the first place.’ Duffy looked across at Vic; he wondered if Vic’s move to the Buckinghamshire/Bedfordshire borders had been a symbolic fugue in quest of a symbolic or actual reintegration.
‘So Jimmy ran into the lake,’ Lucretia said slowly, as if only just following Taffy, ‘because it was a sort of public gesture which would provoke a forceful reaction which he might not knowingly want but which would bring him what all his life — since his rejection as a child — he’d secretly been looking for.’
‘More or less,’ nodded Taffy.
‘I think he did it because he’s potty,’ Henry repeated stolidly.
After lunch Duffy and Vic were on the terrace, sniffing the dangerous air.
‘I like those red flowers,’ said Duffy politely.
&nbs
p; ‘Yes, they’re nice those red flowers,’ replied Vic, ‘but I don’t know what they’re called either. They’re full of those great hornet things, though.’
‘Bumblebees,’ stated Duffy authoritatively.
‘Bees.’
‘Wasps? Bluebottles?’
‘You have to have the odd chuckle, don’t you, with all this going on?’
‘What are you going to do about Mrs Colin?’
‘Mrs Colin? Hadn’t thought. It’s up to Belinda, I expect. I should think she’ll have to go. I mean, that’s the first rule of employing people, isn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ And if it were, Vic might have to let the Hardcastles go as well. Duffy wondered when to mention the matter of Ron’s taste for pink champagne; he also wondered where Ron had shifted the stuff. He couldn’t have drunk it all in the time. ‘Maybe you could give me a day or two on that one?’
Vic grinned. ‘Are you sure you’re up to it? The case of the missing spoons which have turned up anyway in the possession of the culprit who has given a fortnight’s notice. I mean, I’m not sure this isn’t out of your league.’
‘I thought I might be able to pin it on Jimmy.’
‘Yeah. Get him a parking ticket at the same time. Actually, I’m not sure why you’re still here, Duffy.’
‘Detective-Sergeant Vine told us all to stay, didn’t he? And you’re paying me daily rates.’
‘Am I?’
‘A gentleman’s word is his bond.’
‘Do you think those red things are called salvias?’
‘Bound to be. Unless they’re not, of course.’
‘Yeah.’
Mrs Colin’s attic room looked very bare; though whether it was always like this, or whether Mrs Colin had already started putting things away in her case, Duffy couldn’t tell. There was a small crucifix above the bed, a mirror on one wall, a pile of magazines which Mrs Colin had saved from the waste-paper baskets downstairs, and a framed colour print of people in Davao drinking San Miguel beer on somebody’s birthday.