by Rhys Bowen
“Did he have much furniture to move?” Watkins asked.
“She took most of it with her. There was only odds and ends what she left—a table, a bed, that kind of thing, and they went into a friend’s van.”
“Tell us about his friends,” Evan said, leaning toward her. “Did they have friends come to visit here often?”
“What do you think I am, a bleeding spy?” she demanded. “What they did was their own business. But I did notice the occasional person going up and down the stairs. She had some women friends and sometimes one of them Russians would come round for him and they’d come down the stairs together, jabbering away.”
“Would you happen to know the name of any of his friends?”
“The police already asked me that and I told them I’d no idea. I’ve got three tenants in the building and what they do is up to them so long as they don’t make noise and they keep the place clean.”
She glanced at her watch and Evan sensed that they’d better move quickly before she escaped. “So the father looked after Ashley during the day, while his wife worked as a hairdresser, did he?” he asked.
“He was supposed to. Sometimes I baby-sat her, rather than have her taken down to that club with all the smoke. She wasn’t supposed to be near smoke, you know, on account of her weak heart, but both her parents smoked.”
Evan shifted on his seat. “What club was this, Mrs. Strutt?”
“Some place where all the Ruskies get together and talk about how to fiddle the British government. He used to go down there all the time. She didn’t like him going, but he still went.”
“Is it around here?”
“It must be. I can’t say I’ve gone looking for it myself, but I know she went to find him once when she came home from work and he wasn’t here. Was she angry! You should have heard the language. ‘He’s taken my daughter down that effing place again,’ she said. She stormed out and they were all back here within ten minutes.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Strutt. That’s most helpful,” Watkins said. “Anything else you can tell us that might be of help locating him? Anything at all, no matter how small?”
She screwed up her face in concentration, then shook her head. “I’m blowed I can think of anything, but I hope you find him with the little girl. I wouldn’t want her taken to Russia—nasty cold horrible place.”
“Well, that’s something to go on,” Watkins said, as they came out into another rain shower. “Good of you to pick up on the club business. Let’s pop into the local police. They’ll know what’s on their turf.”
“Why didn’t they mention the club to us if they knew about it?” Evan asked.
“They might have asked there and not come up with anything,” Watkins said. “Come on, then. Let’s see if you can find the police station.”
Instead of the sleazy nightclub Evan had pictured, the club turned out to be a Russian tearoom with a Greek restaurant on one side of it and a Laundromat on the other. A large woman in a sari was negotiating a pramful of laundry across the pavement while two little children clung to her skirts. Evan held open the door for the inspector. At first glance the tearoom was empty, but voices were coming from a room at the back.
As they closed the door, a bell rang and an elderly man appeared. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. A table for two?”
“We’re police officers,” Watkins said, and a look of alarm shot across the elderly face. “We’re trying to find out the whereabouts of Ivan Sholokhov. We understand he used to come here.”
“Yes, but no more. He hasn’t been here for one month maybe.” He spoke with a strong accent, but his English was fluent.
“I understand this is a place where Russian immigrants meet. Would it be possible to speak with some of them? It’s very important that we track down Mr. Sholokhov.”
The man hesitated then shrugged expressively. “You can ask these men, but they don’t know where he is.” He shuffled ahead of them down past rows of white-clothed tables and through a bead curtain. Several men were sitting in the gloomy area beyond and, as Mrs. Strutt had predicted, the air was full of cigarette smoke. And some kind of foreign tobacco too—sweet and herby. Faces looked up at them and one man had half risen to his feet.
Watkins raised his hand in a calming gesture. “Sit down, fellows. No cause for alarm. We just want to ask you a few questions about your mate Ivan.”
“Ivan has gone,” a large man with round cheeks and piggy eyes said.
“We know that. We need to trace him. We think he took his daughter with him.”
“And why should he not take his daughter?” a younger, bonier man demanded in clipped, heavily accented English. He was wearing red braces to hold up his trousers. “A man can travel with his child if he wishes.”
“Not if he wasn’t the parent with custody.”
Evan saw the word didn’t mean anything to them. “The court said the mother must have the child with her, and the father could only come to visit.”
“Which court is this?” the young man demanded.
“The divorce court?” Watkins said. “You mean they’re not officially divorced yet?”
“Of course not.” The young man shook his head fiercely. “Johnny and his wife met once with the woman from social service to decide what is best for the child. Then the wife takes the child and goes pffft. Just like that.”
Watkins pulled out a chair and sat beside the young man. “Are you sure of this? They hadn’t awarded custody to the mother? They hadn’t told the mother that Ashley could stay with her?”
“I tell you, it has not yet come to any court. Johnny wants to cause no fuss for his child. He says we must talk with the child welfare lady, and she will help us decide how things will be. But his wife no—she does not want this. She does not want Johnny to see his child no more. So she takes her away.”
A sallow, hollow-eyed man leaned across the table. “Johnny is heartbroken. He has to search for his child. He has no money, no car. What can he do?”
“So what did he do?” Watkins asked patiently.
“He find that his wife now lives far away in the north, in another city. He goes to see her. Then he comes home and we tell him, Johnny—you must see lawyer or this woman will make sure you never be with child again.”
“So he went to a lawyer?”
“We give him money. We take him to immigration lawyer—he is a good man; he will help us. He says he will find us the right kind of lawyer to help Johnny get back his child. He says don’t worry. We go to court and we show them you are good father, and the judge will say that child must be with you.”
“When did this happen?” Watkins asked.
“One month ago Johnny meets with the lawyer. They make date to go to court. Then one day Johnny does not come here anymore.” He spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “We don’t know where he has gone.”
The one with the braces put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I have Johnny’s things at my home. We wait for him to call us, but there is no phone call.”
“Is it possible that he went back to Russia?” Watkins asked.
“To Russia? Pah!” The man almost spat. “Why should he go back to Russia? No good there. Not good life. Johnny likes England. He says England is good place to raise my daughter.”
“Then he must have taken his daughter and gone into hiding with her,” Watkins said. “Look, I’m going to give you my telephone number. If he contacts you, will you please have him telephone us? If there has been no custody hearing—if the judge hasn’t decided—then he’s not going to get into trouble. It’s just that everybody needs to know that the little girl is okay.”
“Johnny would do nothing to harm his child,” the fat man said defiantly. “This child was the light of his life.”
Evan had been standing behind the group in the murk. Now he moved forward. “Perhaps he was afraid the judge wouldn’t let him have his daughter when they went to court.”
“Pah!” The man almost spat again. “The
judge will see who is the good parent and who is the bad. Johnny does everything he can to make things good for daughter. He finds a job where he can work at night, and the daughter can sleep with my two girls. He finds a good place to live.”
“But maybe the judge would favor the English parent?” Watkins suggested.
“This woman? She can be called good parent? Huh! What about men?”
“Men?”
“She is not content to stay home and be a good wife, good mother. No, not she. She likes a good time. She wants to go dancing, and she thinks it’s okay to flirt with other men. Johnny says no. He forbids her to act this way. That is why they fight.”
“It may just be that we’ve been looking at this the wrong way round.” Evan stood outside the tearoom, breathing deeply to rid his lungs of the smoke. “We’ve always assumed that Mrs. Sholokhov was the one in the right. But now we know she lied to us about the custody, don’t we?”
Watkins nodded. “Maybe not flat out lied, but she led us to think that she’d been awarded custody.”
“So what if she was scared that he’d get full custody, and she’s the one who took the child to a remote beach?” Evan asked. “It’s understandable if he wanted his daughter back and came looking for her, isn’t it?”
“That doesn’t give him the right to take the child without the other parent’s permission,” Watkins said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
“Well, from what those men said, it certainly doesn’t sound as if he’s gone back to Russia. I wonder why his wife was so convinced that he had?”
Evan opened the car door for the inspector. Watkins looked up at him as he climbed in. “I’m beginning to think that Mrs. S. may have been leading us up the garden path, Evans.”
“So what do we do now?” Evan started the engine and pulled out into the traffic.
“First of all we have to verify what those Russians told us. They’re obviously on his side. Let’s hear what the mediator at the child protective services really has to say before we go jumping to conclusions. But then I think we have to pay Mrs. Sholokhov a visit in Leeds.”
Chapter 26
The caseworker at the child protective services remembered Ashley and her parents very well. “They both seemed to want what was best for her,” she said, “which always makes it easier. Then the mother decided to move back to York-shire, where she came from. Naturally we were going to make sure that this didn’t prevent the other parent from his share of the custody. We tried to persuade her to remain in London until custody was decided, but she just upped and went.”
“She seems to make a habit of that,” Watkins muttered. “So at this moment they were supposed to be sharing her?”
“They were supposed to be working out how they could both have a relationship with the child that imposed the least stress and disturbance on her. Mr. Sholokhov was trying to be accommodating, I must say. He even volunteered to move up to Leeds so that Ashley wouldn’t have to travel when she went to her mother. Then we lost contact with both of them.”
“So have we, seemingly,” Watkins said.
The woman looked up from the file in front of her. “Please do let us know when you relocate them. I don’t like people taking the law into their own hands, especially not where a child is concerned.”
“That’s about it, then,” Watkins said, as the interview concluded. “Not much more we can do down here, so we won’t have to spend the night, thank God.”
Evan looked around him uneasily. “Of course, it is possible that Sholokhov’s Russian friends are the ones hiding him. He could be upstairs at that very tearoom right now.”
Watkins nodded agreement. “Always possible. I’ll have another word with the D.I. at the local police station and have his men keep their ears to the ground. Maybe we should post a reward—that brings people out of the woodwork, doesn’t it?”
“Not a bad idea,” Evan agreed, “if the D.C.I. is going to find you any money in the budget for a reward.”
“Probably not, mean bastard. I may just go over his head and ask the chief constable myself. Let me call the Met then and you can check in with Glynis, just to make sure she’s not sitting there doing her nails while we’re away.”
“That is definitely a sexist remark,” Evan said with a grin. “You’ll get yourself in trouble one day.”
“Nonsense. Men do their nails too, don’t they?” Watkins smiled back.
Evan got into the car to shut out the street noise before dialing Glynis Davies. He brought her up to date on their interviews.
“So he is really the good guy?” she asked.
“Maybe he’s not the villain.”
“So are we still going to pursue him? He hasn’t committed an offence at this point if he hasn’t tried to leave the country with her. We know Ashley’s being taken care of. It’s up to her parents and the social services to sort things out.”
“All assuming that Johnny S. is the one who has taken his daughter. Did you have any chance to do a background check on the Thomas family?”
“I couldn’t come up with anything on Henry Bosley-Thomas, except for his passing his law exams and his membership at a golf club. There are hundreds of references to Val Thomas. He’s quite famous, so it seems. He’s even got pictures hanging in the Tate Gallery. The Observer called him one of the brightest young stars of the art world.”
“Did they? Good for Val. What about Suzanne and Nick?”
“I haven’t had a chance to get around to them yet, but I will. It’s been quite busy in here, what with one thing and another.”
“One thing and another?”
“D.C.I. Hughes attempting to take over the whole thing and make me redo everything we’ve done so far.”
“D.C.I. Hughes? What’s he poking his nose in for?”
“You tell me. Maybe because the case is getting media attention, and you know how he loves the limelight. Anyway, he showed up and grilled me about everything we had done.”
Evan chuckled. “Tough luck.”
“You’re going to pay for this when you get back,” she said. “I’ll expect no weekends and assignments that end at five o’clock for the next month.”
“I’ll pass on the message to the D.I.”
“See you tomorrow then,” Glynis said. “Oh, and Evan, drive safely, won’t you?”
“If your friends at the rugby club knew that you’d asked to visit an art gallery,” D.I. Watkins muttered.
“It’s research,” Evan said. “I thought we should at least see one of Val Thomas’s pictures while we were in London.”
“And I thought I’d be home in time for the nine o’clock news. What a load of old rubbish this is,” he added. “They call it art?”
Evan had to agree. In this exhibit of current British artists at the new Tate, there were few pictures that were actual representations of anything he could recognize. There was one painting of a black square on a white background, which Evan thought even he could have done just as well. There was even a pile of bricks in the middle of the floor with a label beside it saying, “Destruction of civilization.” Art seemed to be an easy profession these days.
Then at last they saw the plate on the wall beside a large painting. “Valentine Thomas. Lost Bird. 1997.”
Evan stared at it for a long while, then the picture next to it, also by Val. These were no facile squares or piles of bricks, but dark, brooding, frightening scenes reminding Evan of his own nightmares. He saw the fear and the suffering, and he began to understand. Sarah’s death had affected Val as deeply as any of them, but he had only allowed his anguish to spill out onto his paintings.
“Not my cup of tea,” Watkins commented. “Wouldn’t fancy that on the living room wall, would you?”
They had just passed Droitwitch on the M6 when the phone rang.
“Inspector Watkins, it’s P.C. Davies here.”
“You’re working late, Glynis,” Watkins said. “Have you got some news for us?’
“I think I
might have. Listen, sir, Evan asked me to check into the backgrounds of the Thomas family. I’ve been in touch with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It seems that Nick Thomas stood trial for child molestation two years ago. He was acquitted, but I thought you’d want to know.”
“Bloody’ell, Evans. You were right all along,” Watkins exclaimed, as Glynis hung up.
Evan shook his head. “Nick? I can’t believe Nick had anything to do with any of this. He couldn’t have had anything to do with Sarah—for one thing he was only a little boy at the time, and for another, he was king in the game they were playing. He was guarding the top of the hill. He couldn’t have come down without being seen.”
“But what about Ashley’s disappearance? What if you were right, and it wasn’t her father after all? Sometimes an upsetting event like that in early childhood can unhinge a person. You know that as well as I do.”
“But he’s a priest. He always seemed like a nice bloke.”
“You know damned well that even serial killers come across as nice blokes. Do we know where to find him? He hasn’t left the country, has he?”
“As far as I know, he’s still at the Everest Inn. He and his brother were going to stay a couple of extra days.”
“Everest Inn, is it? Quite an easy drive down to the caravan park from there. Well, put your foot down, boyo. We’re going to call on Father Thomas tonight, before he vanishes on us like everyone else.”
Rain peppered the windscreen and flew off the wipers as Evan drove as fast as he dared. Giant lorries hauling one, two, or even three trailers threw up curtains of spray, making passing them a breath-holding experience, but Evan was driven by the same sense of urgency as the inspector. Nick Thomas—the quiet one whom everyone liked. Was it possible that he had anything to do with Ashley’s disappearance. If so, would they get him to confess? He didn’t want to believe it, and it still didn’t explain what had happened to Sarah. Did Nick know something about her disappearance that he’d kept to himself? Had he witnessed something from his hilltop vantage point that day?