by M. J. Trow
‘I understand, Lindsey, really I do,’ Maxwell said. He looked around his office, papered as it was with nostalgia and memories. He wondered how he would feel if anyone came in here and told him a few home truths about his heroes, his heroines. He knew they had feet of clay and he decided to ignore them – Shane might only be five foot two in his stockinged feet, but he could still outgun the best. If someone told him that Nolan was not his, if someone told him that Metternich was moonlighting as someone else’s cat, called Tiddles and eschewing vole for canned tuna, if someone told him that Jacquie was… time to stop the ifs. Lindsey Summers’ world was shaking apart and she was lashing out. But he needed to get her to see the facts, not to dismiss her daughter as a liar. ‘I don’t think we should jump to conclusions until my wife gets here. Had April talked to anyone else about the baby?’
‘Just me and Phil. And my mum, but she just shouted, called her names. Called me names, come to that. That’s why she came home. Mum isn’t very… understanding. So that’s why I knew she wasn’t there, but we looked, all the same.’
‘Has she told her friends, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt it, but I don’t know her friends very well, what with her going to school near mum’s. She sees her friends when she’s there, really. Not at ours.’
‘On her mobile all the time, I imagine?’
She managed a smile. ‘Aren’t they all? Texting, talking, Facebook, all that. I wouldn’t have let her have one if it was just me, but all her mates have the latest thing. You know how it is.’
Maxwell had a drawer in his desk for the specific purpose of storing captured mobiles and he hadn’t waited for that nice Mr Gove to tell him it was all right to confiscate them. He knew all right. ‘Has she taken her mobile?’
‘Yeah…’ Somehow, the word came out sounding rather uncertain.
‘Are you sure? Did you look?’
‘Well, no. Her bag had gone, so we just assumed…’
‘Is Phil at home?’
‘With the little ones, yes.’
‘Ring him. Ask him to look.’ He nodded at the phone. ‘Dial Nine for an outside line.’
Without taking her eyes off him, she reached for the phone and then glanced at it only for as long as it took to dial her home number. Then she fixed her eyes on his face again. ‘Phil? It’s me. Look, don’t ask me why, can you just run up to our April’s room and check for her phone… I know she doesn’t ever go out without it, just check, will you?’ She held the phone to her chest until an indignant quack made her put it back to her ear. ‘Yes, I’m here. Is it? Oh, God, Phil. Where was it?’ She waited while he explained and he clearly wanted to know more, but she signed off with a brusque, ‘Gotta go,’ and hung up.
‘Still there?’ Maxwell asked gently.
‘Mmmm.’ She nodded her head.
‘Where was it?’
‘Under her pillow. Where she always puts it at night.’
‘When Mrs Maxwell gets here…’ but he cut himself short at the sound of a well-loved tread along his mezzanine corridor. ‘We’ll let her take over now, Lindsey. She’ll know what to do.’
Sylvia Matthews was putting the final touches to the emergency packs in her store cupboard when there came a tentative tap on the door.
‘Yes?’ She turned round and met the clear blue gaze of Sarah, known better to Maxwell as Thingee One. She had to bite back the name and instead managed to get it right. ‘Sarah. How odd to see you in the afternoon. How can I help you?’
‘I just wondered if you had any news of Charlotte. I tried ringing and she isn’t picking up.’
‘We missed her at the hospital yesterday, Sarah,’ Sylvia said, still folding and counting under her breath. ‘Mr Maxwell and I were a little concerned when we couldn’t find her, but we went to Mr Baines’ house and he managed to get through and she said she’s okay. A bit confused, poor girl. The list went all to pot yesterday and she didn’t have her procedure.’ The euphemism ran slickly off her tongue. ‘She discharged herself – she was rather upset and I can understand why.’
‘But that’s rubbish, Mrs Matthews, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘Sarah! What do you mean?’ Sylvia was as shocked as she would be if one of Maxwell’s posters had suddenly come to life. ‘I can assure you…’
‘I’m not calling you a liar, Mrs Matthews. Don’t think that. But that bastard Baines, he’s one and no mistake. He didn’t ring Charlotte and if he did, she didn’t answer him.’
‘Well… couples, you know how it is,’ Sylvia hedged. ‘None of us knows what goes on behind closed doors.’
‘Yes, I accept that,’ Sarah said, sharply. ‘But when it comes to Charlotte and that bastard, I do know. She blocked his number.’
Sylvia used a mobile, but wasn’t really sure about everything it could do. If someone told her that theirs could cook the Sunday lunch, she wouldn’t have dismissed it out of hand. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t really know what that means.’
‘It means,’ the girl said, speaking clearly as though to her granny, ‘that if he rang her, it wouldn’t get past him punching in the number. Her phone just wouldn’t accept it. The call wouldn’t go through. There would be nothing for her to answer, because it wouldn’t ring at her end.’
Sylvia stopped folding and counting and looked at the girl aghast. ‘So he made up that whole conversation? How extraordinary.’
‘He’s such a big headed bastard. He wouldn’t want you to know that she wouldn’t speak to him either. He didn’t speak to her last night. Or for some time, when she had anything to do with it.’
‘I didn’t know it was as bad as that,’ the school nurse said.
‘God, yes. She hasn’t made too much about it, but she told me. She thought he might not be too pleased about the baby, but he flipped. Told her that he was seeing other women, that they were all better in bed than her, she lay there like a dead thing, all that. The stuff blokes say, you know, when they want there to be no going back.’
Mr Matthews had been no prize, God knew, but Sylvia realised that perhaps with her history of him and Guy, she had had it easy.
‘In fact, he told her, he was, almost as he spoke, giving one to that piece in IT, you know, the new one. The NQT who never made it.’
‘We never met.’ Sylvia was not surprised, however. The woman was clearly out looking for anything in trousers; it was all in the body language.
‘Well, that lasted less than five minutes, but Charlotte had got the message. That’s when she blocked his number and decided on the termination.’
‘I didn’t know Andrew Baines was quite as bad as that.’
‘Anything with a pulse,’ Thingee One said. ‘I should know. He had me pressed up against the coat racks last Christmas, before he got round to Charlotte.’
Sylvia’s eyes were wide. ‘What did you do?’
‘Kneed him in the nuts, Mrs Matthews, not to put too fine a point on it. Hats off to him for managing what he managed later with Charlotte. But he’s hated me ever since. He doesn’t like to be crossed. I may be over-reacting, but I think we should carry on looking for Charlotte.’
Sylvia drew herself up and decided to pull rank, although there was no actual hierarchy here except age and experience. ‘I’ll go and see Mr Maxwell, see what he thinks.’
‘Mrs Maxwell is up there. And that woman, the one with the kid.’
In a school of well over a thousand pupils, that should have meant nothing, but Sylvia put two and two together. ‘Right.’ She rubbed her forehead, overcome with unfamiliar indecision. ‘I’ll go and see Andrew Baines, then. Is he still in the school?’
‘Yes. But you’ll have to be quick. He goes to do that gym club thing today. He’s going to work there full time soon – good riddance to bad rubbish.’
‘I heard he had a new job. Where is it?’
‘Somewhere posh. Not sure where. Just not here and that’s good enough for me.’
‘I’ll pop over,’ Sylvia said. ‘If you s
ee Mr Maxwell – or Mrs Maxwell – can you tell them I’d like a word, please? And, Sarah…’
‘Yes?’
‘Thanks for all this. You’re a true friend to Charlotte.’
‘We Thingees have to stick together, Mrs Matthews,’ the girl said. ‘I’m sure she’s all right, but I won’t rest until we’re sure.’
‘Same here,’ Sylvia smiled. She followed the girl out and turned right towards the gym. ‘Can you text me your number?’
‘Will do,’ the girl said. How sweet, she thought, when these old dears use mobiles.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lindsey Summers was feeling better than she had for ages. Mr and Mrs Maxwell were sitting one on either side of her and they were helping her to find April. Her life had been a series of alarums and excursions almost since her birth – having a crazy, shouty mother is no way to grow up calm. And yet, here she was, sipping tea while these nice people put her world to rights. When she came out of this fog, half Maxwell, have diazepam, she knew that everything would be fine, April would be a good little girl in pigtails and her coming baby would be a pink-cheeked angel who never cried. She switched off almost all of her brain and just drifted.
Jacquie reached round behind the woman and poked Maxwell in the back. He leaned forward so he could see her face and raised an eyebrow.
‘I think we’ve lost her,’ Jacquie mouthed. ‘Is she on anything?’
Maxwell spread his hands. For all that he had seen more of this woman in the last three days than he had his own wife, he knew next to nothing about her. Her daughter was missing – what more did they need to know? Jacquie got up carefully and walked to the door, motioning Maxwell to follow her. They stepped out into the corridor, mercifully quiet now except for some distant hoovering and some incoherent shouts with more than a whiff of Mrs B about them. They left the door open and kept a weather eye out for Lindsey Summers falling off her seat and leaned in to each other so they could speak in mutters.
Maxwell went first. ‘Where do you think she is?’ he said.
Jacquie took a deep breath and bit her lip for a second, then said, ‘Are you thinking Shannon Matthews?’
‘I wasn’t,’ Maxwell said, surprised. ‘You mean that you really think Lindsey has April stashed under a bed somewhere, waiting for the big reveal?’
‘No. I just wondered whether you did.’
‘No, I don’t. I think that poor old Lindsey really has lost her daughter, but whether her daughter considers herself lost or just staying elsewhere is moot.’
‘I would agree, except that with her history, we can’t just wait and see. I spoke to the latest victim last night and it seems to me that this guy is upping his game. He’s getting impatient. He can’t be bothered with more than half an hour’s chat now before he has his hands round their throats. Forget the slow seduction. It’s all about the throttling now.’
‘But why would he look for April again? He must know she will have been to the police.’
Jacquie smiled and patted his arm. ‘The trouble with you, Max, is that you assume everyone is like you, thinking of every eventuality, relying on commonsense. He probably doesn’t think anything of the kind. He has reached a point where he doesn’t think these girls have any value unless he is in the frame. They don’t exist except when in his company.’
‘There must be a syndrome.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Well, you know how once upon a time, there were two sorts of people. People who conformed to the norms and people who didn’t. The people who didn’t were two sorts of people. They were either nicely eccentric…’ he paused to see if she would make a sassy remark, but she settled for a sweet smile and a pat on his cheek, ‘and those who were pretty unpleasant to be around. And that was about it. Then, the experts thought that perhaps some names for these different people would be handy and so the Syndrome was born. There’s a kid in Year 9 – Nine Ell Pee if memory serves – who can’t sit still and chats incorrigibly to his oppos during lessons. Once we would have called him a bloody nuisance, slapped him round the head and sent him down the Social. Now he is the Syndrome Kid and he has to be allowed to express his individuality; the other twenty nine in the class? Who cares?’
‘I think sociopath covers our man quite well.’
Maxwell was unconvinced. ‘Let’s see what his brief comes up with before we guess his label,’ he said.
‘Let’s catch him first.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Look, is Sylvia still likely to be here? I don’t like the look of Lindsey at all. She seems to have withdrawn completely. That can’t be good for her in her condition.’
Maxwell looked in through the open door, to where April’s mother was sitting staring into her empty cup. ‘That sounds like a plan. Then we can go and start looking for April properly.’
‘We?’ Jacquie looked quizzically at her husband. She could get away with a lot with Henry Hall, that was a given, but having Maxwell trotting through the streets of Leighford in a stab vest looking under bushes for a missing schoolgirl was not on the list of acceptable behaviour.
‘You, heart, of course. I mean you. But I can help, surely? It was to me that she came, after all. I have her trust, all that kind of thing.’
‘We’ll have to speak to Henry. But meanwhile, can you ring Sylv?’
Maxwell crept into his room and picked up the phone, dialling the Sick Room’s number by rote. He stood looking at Lindsey Summers while the phone rang in an empty room, then put down the receiver. ‘Not there,’ he mouthed at his wife, who gestured to him to come nearer.
‘In that case, Max, I’m going to have to call the team. And an ambulance. This poor woman needs some proper care.’
‘I wonder where Sylv is, though? She doesn’t usually leave until everyone else has gone. I expect she’ll be even worse now Guy is working at his new school – she was telling me last night, his hours are ridiculous.’
‘Tried Thingee? Oh… is there a Thingee on this afternoon?’
‘Yes, Thingee One is covering. She’s become Thingee All The Time. I’ll try her.’ He tiptoed back to the phone and dialled zero. This time, the phone answered at once.
‘Yes, Mr Maxwell?’
He was always a touch startled when they knew who was calling but he rallied. ‘Thingee, old thing, I was wondering if you knew where Mrs Matthews might be. We could do with her up here, if she’s within hail. Oh, and there will be an ambulance arriving shortly – can you point the nice people in green in the direction of my office, please?’
‘Ambulance? Is everyone all right?’
Maxwell paused as he always did when a cliché was offered him on a plate, but decided to leave it be. Why should there be an ambulance arriving, after all, if everyone was all right? ‘Mrs Summers isn’t feeling too good,’ he said. ‘Nothing serious. But… Mrs Matthews?’
‘She was going to the gym,’ the girl said. ‘She wanted to see if she could catch Mr Baines.’ Maxwell couldn’t see the expression on her face, but her voice was quite a giveaway.
‘I see.’ He could get the details from Sylv shortly. ‘Do you know, Thingee, I have absolutely no idea if there is a phone in the gym.’
‘There’s one in the office,’ she said. ‘They hardly ever answer it, though. It drives us mad.’
‘Can you do me a favour, dear one?’ he smarmed. ‘Can you nip along there and see if she’s still in the building? If she is, we really would appreciate it if she could come up to my office.’
‘No problem, Mr Maxwell. I’ll ring from there when I find out what’s going on.’ The girl pulled off her headset and went into the corridor. When all this was sorted, she really had to try and swap shifts with Charlotte. Afternoons were so much more exciting than mornings!
Thingee ambled along the corridor to the gym and pushed open the door carefully. There was a probably inaccurate but nevertheless amusing story about Mr Diamond once walking in to the gym unannounced and getting a basketball right in the face and although it was droll to have it
happen to someone else, Sarah had places to be that evening which would not be enhanced by a couple of black eyes and a fat lip.
‘Hello! Cooee!’ The girl walked in a few steps through that old indefinable smell of ropes, sweat and liniment, then remembered the no-heels rule and hopped first on one leg, then the other to remove her shoes. ‘Mr Baines! Mrs Matthews!’ All she got was an echo mocking her from the wall bars, benches and other paraphernalia that she had been more than glad to see the back of when she left school. ‘Is anyone here? It’s Sarah. Mr Maxwell needs Mrs Matthews urgently upstairs.’ She played her final sentence back and added, ‘In his office.’ She listened again and, opening the door, turned back for a final shout. ‘Cooee?’ There was clearly no one there. She put her shoes back on and went back along the corridor towards reception. Only another half hour and she could go home. The days were long now she was covering for Charlotte, but she would have a nice fat payslip next month, so she kept her eyes on the prize. She was just passing the mouth of Hell, aka the SLT corridor, when a voice stopped her.
‘Sarah! I thought you were only here in the morning.’
She turned. Oh bugger. When Bernard Ryan called you by name it was never going to end well. ‘Mr Ryan,’ she said. ‘I’m covering for Charlotte while she’s not well.’
‘I see. Can you type?’
Sarah was surprised that not everyone could type. She sometimes thought she had been born at a keyboard. ‘Yes.’
‘Could you come and do a couple of letters for me. I’m… a bit behind.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, adding in the privacy of her head, I bet you are. Being arrested and suspended will do that for a person. ‘Can I just…’ she gestured towards reception.
‘It won’t take a minute. It is rather urgent.’
‘Okay.’ Afternoons were a lot more interesting and this one became doubly so as the doors to the foyer crashed back and three paramedics trotted in. Raising her voice, she called, ‘Up the stairs. Mezzanine. They’re waiting for you.’
‘My word, Sarah,’ the new improved Bernard Ryan said. ‘That’s a nice bit of multitasking there. Anything I should know about?’