Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  He took his leave of the girl he was to encounter again many years later when she was a senior police detective, and decided to try another house across the road. And there he struck lucky, if that was the word.

  The man who answered the door to him did so swiftly with something of a flourish, as he did everything. Charles Peabody was not a man to mince words, either. When Mac enquired whether he knew his daughter, or had any idea where she might be, Peabody introduced himself in such a way that the Scotsman felt he was supposed to know who he was, and then proceeded to pass on what scant information he had and to give his opinion in a pompously forceful manner.

  “If you want to know the truth, nobody’s seen nor heard of Clara Marshall or her girls for nearly a year,” he announced. “And it’s high time somebody did something about it, I say. Richard Marshall’s already moved his bit on the side in. And her a married woman, too. It’s not right. It’s a scandal, that’s what it is.”

  “As for your daughter, well, there’s all sorts of stories around in the town about what might have happened to her. She’s your girl, Mr. MacDonald, and I don’t want to alarm you. But there’s plenty round here who’d put nothing past Richard Marshall, nothing at all.”

  In spite of his professed intention not to alarm Sean MacDonald, Peabody displayed little restraint or sensitivity.

  Obviously not the man’s style, thought Mac obliquely, as he felt a cold chill run through his body. He didn’t need Charles Peabody to spell out the stories which were abundant in Torquay. He didn’t actually need anything spelled out. He had to admit that for some time now, ever since that Christmas check had been cleared without acknowledgement, there had been nasty lurking doubts in the back of his mind concerning the welfare of his daughter and her children.

  He had dismissed them as fanciful. Richard Marshall might be a small-time villain and a man he strongly disliked, but to turn him into anything else was merely being self-indulgent, he had told himself.

  Now he allowed all those thoughts, his doubts, to overtake him. He had no more time for neighbours’ tittle-tattle. He wanted the truth.

  He said thank you and goodbye to Mr. Peabody in as calm a manner as he could manage, and as soon as the other man closed his front door he half-ran across the road back to Parkview where he hammered noisily on the door, his heart pumping like a piston engine.

  Marshall didn’t respond quickly enough. Mac began to shout then. “Come on, you bastard. Come on. Answer this bloody door before I knock it down.”

  Eventually Richard Marshall had opened the door. But only a crack. The security chain remained in place.

  “What do you want?” he asked nervously.

  “I want to know where my daughter is. I want to know what you’ve done with my daughter, you bastard.”

  “You’re mad. I’ve told you. She’s left me, I don’t know where she is.”

  “I think you do know, you bastard. You fucking bastard. I think you do know. And I’ll not rest till I get the truth, I promise you that.”

  “You’re mad, and you’ve been listening to gossip. I saw you, running around to the neighbours.”

  “If you’ve harmed a hair of my daughter’s head I’ll kill you, I promise you, you fucker,” screamed Mac.

  “You and which army?”

  Marshall, perhaps given confidence by his security chain, had returned to his normal arrogance, which had always so infuriated Mac.

  The Scotsman lunged crazily forward trying to reach through the narrow gap between the door and its frame. He went for Marshall’s throat. He wanted to throttle the bastard. Although how he thought he would succeed in doing so through a crack in the door he had no idea. He was not thinking, of course.

  Marshall pulled sharply back, threw his substantial weight behind the door and smashed it shut. Mac only just got his hands out in time.

  He pulled himself together. Stepped back. Tears were coursing down his cheeks. He wiped them away with the back of one hand, struggled to regain control. He was trembling from head to foot. Mac was a strong man physically and mentally. But suddenly he had collapsed. His whole world had collapsed. He turned and lurched along the path. At the gate he stumbled, reached out and held on to a gatepost for support. As he did so he noticed the girl from next door. She was standing on the pavement just behind the fence. He had little doubt that she had been watching and listening.

  “What the hell do ye think you’re doing?” Mac yelled. “Just get the hell out of here, now.”

  The girl had obeyed at once. Her eyes wide with fear she took off at a run through the big gates into the house next door and up the driveway, her feet barely touching the ground, she was moving so fast.

  Fleetingly, Mac was ashamed of himself for rounding on a mere child. He hadn’t been able to help himself, though. His tears were still falling in spite of his efforts to control them, and Mac was a proud man. A man’s man. He had never been able to stand anyone, not even his late wife, seeing him cry. And yet there he was on a public thoroughfare blubbing like a baby.

  He couldn’t help that either.

  Suddenly, with devastating clarity, he had been overwhelmed with a terrible knowledge. He believed beyond any doubt at all that he would indeed never see his daughter and her children again. Just as Clara had told him.

  But he believed now that she was dead. That they were all dead. And that Richard Marshall had killed them.

  That evening and throughout the night, spent in the Grand Hotel on the seafront, torturing himself in a place that he knew had been a great favourite of his daughter’s, Sean MacDonald struggled with the terrible revelation that had overwhelmed him.

  In the morning he went to Torquay Police Station to report that his daughter Mrs. Clara Marshall and her two little girls Lorraine and Janine were missing.

  Chapter Six

  At Torquay Police Station twenty-seven years later Karen sat in thought for a few moments following her phone call to Sean MacDonald. She had not been surprised by his reaction. She knew exactly what the potential of this freak discovery would mean to him.

  Neither she nor anybody else could bring Clara Marshall and her children back. But perhaps they really could bring Richard Marshall to justice at last. She’d make sure she gave it her best shot, that was for certain; and so, she was sure, would all of her team. This was so much more than just another case. Karen leaned forward in her chair, ready for action again, and buzzed Phil Cooper who appeared swiftly in the open doorway of her office.

  “Right, Phil, I have a list for you,” she began briskly. “One, we need to establish that the Rolex belonged to Clara. Get somebody to track down this retired jeweller, Gavin, in Inverness. Mac says he a bought a Rolex for Clara from him.” She passed Cooper the piece of paper on which she had written the details. “It’s a very long shot that he’ll still have any records, but you never know. Meanwhile get the watch to the Rolex HQ in Kent, and get it to them today. Tell them we need them to do their stuff again, just like they did on that other case. Tell them we need to know where that watch was sold. And we need to know fast. If we’re going to pick up Marshall I want to get on with it. He probably knows what we’ve found off Berry Head, it’s already been in the papers and on the news. I don’t want him doing some sort of disappearing act. He’s just the sort of bastard who’d be capable of making himself disappear permanently. If we can prove quickly that watch was sold by Gavin, and the date, then that would establish near enough one hundred percent that it was bought by Mac. We’re there then. And we’d have really strong circumstantial evidence against Marshall at last. At least we’d have a body, even if it’s only a damaged skeleton.”

  “Two. Find out where Marshall is, or Ricky Maxwell, as I believe he calls himself nowadays. I want to be sure that when the moment comes we can get to him right away.”

  “Three. Make sure Torquay Hospital have arranged for the skeleton to be dispatched to that lab in London where they establish the isotopes of bones. I’m not going to wait for the
results before picking up Marshall and hopefully charging him, but it would be good to know for certain more or less how long those remains have been in the water well before we go to court.”

  “And four. This investigation is top priority again. Get the team sifting through this lot.” Karen gestured at a dozen or so cardboard boxes piled against the far wall of her office, records of the initial investigation that had been brought out of storage the previous day. The case had never been formally closed, as indeed no unsolved murder case in Great Britain ever is, and virtually each year had added at least some new information, though none of it, so far, ever of much use.

  “Tell the guys they’re looking for anything, anything at all that may have been overlooked before and could give us a new lead,” Karen continued. “There might be something that is relevant now, because we’ve found that skeleton, that wasn’t before. And when they’ve finished with this lot there’s plenty more paperwork we haven’t dug out yet, and then there’s bits and bobs on computer, too, that have been added more recently.”

  “Consider it done, boss.”

  Karen could see that the sergeant was really buzzing. They all were. This was the big one for them. They all wanted to get Marshall so much.

  She followed Cooper as he hurried out of her office—he on the way to the incident room, she on the way to the coffee machine.

  Back in her office clutching her paper cup of something that certainly had the colour of coffee even if maybe not the flavour, Karen allowed herself to reflect on her own involvement all those years ago. She had been little more than a child when it had all happened. What could she have known really? There were things, though, things that had bugged her for nearly thirty years.

  She cast her mind back, trying to sort out her jumbled thoughts.

  It was about a month before Clara Marshall disappeared that Karen was sent home from school early because of a power cut. At about 2.30 in the afternoon she had arrived at Laurel House to find the front door locked, which was unusual in mid-afternoon. Puzzled, Karen had rung the doorbell. And she’d had to do so twice more before her mother had finally opened it.

  Margaret Meadows had been wearing one of the flimsy floral dressing gowns she specialized in, and nothing else, her daughter had thought. Not even underwear. She looked on edge, and glanced quickly over her shoulder at least twice as she let Karen in.

  “You’re ever so early, dear, I wasn’t expecting you yet,” she muttered nervously.

  Karen explained what had happened at school, all the while studying her mother curiously. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t work out what. Her mother picked up on it, and presumably felt she needed to explain her attire.

  “I-I was about to have a bath, dear,” she said, with a hesitant, slightly apologetic smile.

  Karen followed her into the hall, without further comment. She was, however, watchful, just as always. She had never known her mother to take a bath in the middle of the afternoon. Margaret Meadows had a routine, whether she was drinking or not. Once she finally got out of bed, which was usually around mid-morning and sometimes not until midday, she always bathed before putting on her make-up. Karen had never yet known her to face the day ahead without going through that routine.

  She was still studying her mother with interest when Richard Marshall came bounding down the stairs, white shirt undone, his jacket, a dark-coloured blazer of some sort, with shiny gold buttons, slung casually over one shoulder, his shock of dark curly hair tousled.

  “I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with that tap, Margaret,” he said obliquely.

  “Oh. Uh. Thank you, Richard.”

  Karen turned to face her mother. Margaret Meadows had blushed crimson. She bowed her head slightly as if trying to hide her face behind the blonde veil of her hair. Then she looked up and put on a bright smile which was not reflected in her eyes.

  “Richard’s been fixing that dripping tap in the bathroom, dear,” she told her daughter, obviously feeling another explanation was called for. “Wasn’t that nice of him?”

  Karen may have had to grow up beyond her years, but she still had the directness and simplicity of thought which goes with youth.

  “We didn’t have a dripping tap in the bathroom,” she said flatly.

  “Of course we did, darling.” This time Margaret Meadows’ smile was indulgent. “You just haven’t noticed. Other things on your mind, I expect.”

  Margaret had then turned towards Richard again. “Oh, these young girls,” she said.

  It had been Karen’s turn to blush then. She could cheerfully have slapped her mother. Did the woman think she was stupid or something? Didn’t she realize Karen was pretty damned sure she knew exactly what was going on? Why was she trying to make Karen look like a fool?

  Richard Marshall pulled on his jacket. He was smirking too, or so it seemed to Karen. Although he had at least had the decency to attempt to fabricate some sort of reason for having been upstairs with her mother, his attitude was that of a man who simply didn’t give a damn.

  He hadn’t even bothered to comb his hair, after all, or to finish dressing properly. He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, and he actually reached forward and ruffled Karen’s hair.

  “Well, if you can’t enjoy yourself at her age, when can you?” he asked of no one in particular, while beaming at her in a horribly patronizing fashion.

  Karen had felt her blush deepening which seriously annoyed her. She remembered how even then his demeanour was that of a man who thought he was invincible, a man who thought he was untouchable. Which was perhaps why he had dared just a short while later to do the dreadful deed she was so sure he was guilty of.

  It would never have occurred to Richard Marshall back then that he would get caught out in anything that he did, Karen felt. She hadn’t known then that he had already served time in jail. Had she done so she would merely have been forced to wonder at how little effect it had had on him. She pulled away from him, shaking her whole body as if to rid herself of his touch, and hurried into the kitchen, leaving him and her mother alone in the hall to make their farewells.

  It was the only time that Karen ever caught the pair of them together and she had no idea whether or not they had been having a full-blown affair, or if this had been a one-afternoon stand. True to form in the Meadows household the incident was never mentioned again and Karen told nobody about it. Certainly she knew better than to mention it to her father. Neither did she tell the police, and her failure to do that was later to haunt her even though it never even occurred to her at the time.

  Whatever the extent of her mother’s relationship with Richard Marshall, Karen was quite sure that something had been going on and, in spite of her youth, equally convinced that she knew what the two of them had been doing the day she came home from school early.

  But if she had ever had any doubts at all, these would have been assuaged the day a major missing-persons enquiry was finally launched and Richard Marshall was arrested, almost exactly a year after his family’s disappearance. Karen had been forced to prop her mother up during yet another drinking binge combined with a bout of depression, and Margaret Meadows had made it quite clear that this latest attack of bad nerves, as the family described her condition back then, had been brought about by Richard’s arrest. She had been distraught for days, which even at the time had confused Karen considerably.

  After all, it was the talk of the town that Richard had installed Esther Hunter at Parkview less than a month after his wife and children disappeared. Everyone, it seemed, including Karen and all her school friends, knew all about it. Esther Hunter was not only a hairdresser with her own business but she was also married to a popular Torquay builder who was a town councillor. She was well known locally, as, of course, was her husband. Her liaison with Richard, so unfortunately soon, it seemed, after the disappearance of Clara and the girls, was a big local scandal and it was that, as much as anything, which had focused attention on the strange events surround
ing the Marshall family. Indeed, his indecent haste over Esther was generally seen to be Marshall’s motive for getting rid of his wife and children.

  Karen’s mother knew all about Esther Hunter. Karen never saw her mother alone with Richard Marshall again and was pretty sure there was no longer an affair going on between them. She would have noticed, she felt certain. She was, after all, a pretty good spy. She didn’t miss much. So why had her mother been so distressed to learn that, in her words, “the police have taken Richard”?

  Karen had not understood then and, to tell the truth, she did not understand now. She did know all about the mesmerizing effect Marshall seemed to have on the women in his life. He turned them into blithering idiots, it seemed to her. And she remembered well enough that although the police had not found grounds to charge Richard Marshall back in 1976, and he had been released after little more than twenty-four hours and had been able to return to the Parkview Hotel and Esther Hunter, their investigation had not stopped there. Bill Talbot himself had visited Karen’s street, high above the bay, on at least two occasions and talked to various neighbours. And naturally he had come to see Karen’s mother. Her involvement, albeit peripheral, was already on record. But Karen, although not privy to the interviews, was certain her mother had told him no more than she had the two officers whose visit she had listened to at the keyhole.

  Karen also remembered being embarrassed and made to feel uneasy just by the sight of Richard Marshall and Esther Hunter together at that time. She could not avoid bumping into them occasionally, even though she would have preferred not to. Marshall remained as bold and brash as ever. Karen invariably blushed when he spoke to her. On the other hand, Esther Hunter rarely said anything. Once Karen dropped a shopping bag at her feet and Esther, a small fair woman with a big gentle smile, had helped her pick up the spilt shopping. Karen remembered her appearing to be almost as shy and awkward as she herself felt. And Karen had blushed terribly, of course.