‘What happens next?’ she asked then.
‘We shall be in touch with your father. As soon as he’s paid up, you will be returned to his loving care.’
Janet considered this coolly.
‘As a matter of interest, how much are you asking for me?’
‘We haven’t decided yet.’
‘He’ll break your effing heads open next time he sees you. You’ll never be able to set foot in Bagshawe Broome again.’
‘Leave us to worry about that.’
‘For a third of the takings, I’ll make things easy for you.’
‘Get her out of my sodding sight,’ Kevin said.
‘Come on, Janet. It’s time I showed you our guest-room.’
‘No deal?’
‘No deal.’
‘Then don’t be surprised if you have problems.’
She opened her schoolbag and peered into it.
‘God! Algebra! The Treaty of Utrecht! And the reproductive system of the frigging newt. What a night’s entertainment! Is there anything to read in this place?’
Bootsie indicated a row of eight books on a shelf alongside the fireplace: a Readers’ Digest Compendium of seasonal gardening tasks; a ready reckoner – in pounds, shillings and pence; a paperback Emmerdale Farm; a Family Medical Guide, published before the discovery of penicillin; and a pocket New Testament, with the facsimile signature of Field Marshall French – a 1914 trench issue. Janet Morrison chose the Medical Directory for her bedtime reading.
Bootsie took her upstairs to a room unfit for occupation by a young lady of refinement. It smelled of damp rot and senile illnesses and its stained ticking mattress was bare of sheets or blankets. A horse-blanket had been nailed over the window and Janet, carrying out a tour of inspection as soon as she was left alone, found that the panes had been sealed off with small-mesh chicken-wire, with staples driven in every inch all the way round. The only useful implement she had with her was a nail-file whose point snapped off before she got any purchase with it. The light was an unshaded, cobwebby forty-watt bulb and she lay on the bed and turned the pages from a line drawing of a bronchitis-kettle to the anatomy of a naked but very modestly equipped male.
Her father woke briefly, but did not recognize his surroundings. His weight had compressed his left arm and leg into a temporary paralysis. He groaned as he turned over on to his back and he was asleep again before he could take serious stock of himself.
Timothy John Fawcett’s voice on the phone was no sleepier in the evening than at any other time, but he was able to quote, apparently without reference to notes, a list of some eight properties whose siting and vacancy might well have attracted Bootsie and Kev. One of them was Lower Edge Cottage, the last building to remain relatively intact up on Royds Intake.
Bootsie and Kev were fighting like famished terriers. Janet got up silently and put her ear to the panel of the bedroom door. They were quarrelling about her – or, at least, about what value they should put on her. Kevin, who clearly shared popular local delusions about the Morrison fortune, was in favour of a five-figure sum. Bootsie, who belonged to the small profits, quick returns school, thought they should settle for fifty quid in used notes.
‘That,’ Janet said to herself, ‘is an effing insult.’
But even at that, she was far from confident that her father would lob up. He was more likely to look round for somebody to thump, thump the wrong one, and perhaps put her in real jeopardy.
Half an hour later, Bootsie and Kev themselves came upstairs, their row still on. Kevin was complaining about the lack of amenities of this hovel, and Bootsie was pointing out that it was he who had found it.
‘And what’s more,’ she said, ‘it’s ideal. Abso-effing-lutely i-effing-deal.’
Janet studied a photograph of an Edwardian patient with a drooping moustache and sad eyes, lying stripped to a loincloth on a hospital bed. An arrow showed amateur diagnosticians how to find MacBurney’s point, the tenderest spot in the abdomen when appendicitis has dug itself in.
Silence eventually prevailed in the next room, but was soon broken by the rhythmical creaking of a bedstead that did not sound as if it were likely to stand up to the demands about to be made of it. Janet listened with the critical sensitivity of a connoisseuse, but when the couple reached the stage of respiratory distress and abandoned murmuring, she got up and hammered on the partition wall.
‘It’s worse than Tuesday and Saturday nights at our bloody house,’ she shouted, and when her banging resulted in a cessation of the transports, it gave her such satisfaction that she actually grinned.
‘Stop that hammering, you bloody little bitch,’ Bootsie called through the wall.
It was some time before the proceedings got under way again. They were subdued, and came quickly to a climax of which the connoisseuse apparently did not think much. She screwed up her face.
‘I hope they’re not three-or-four-times-a-bloody-nighters,’ she said.
Chapter Thirteen
Detective-Superintendent Tom Grimshaw had in a steel cupboard a reserve of cyclostyled sheets that were a great comfort to him at times of fevered activity. They were his shopping-lists of systematic routines, to be followed in standard emergencies such as royal visits, Bradburn Rovers at home to Bradcaster United, sit-ins at the Technical College, the annual Hemp Valley Fur and Feather Show, visits by HM Inspector of Constabulary and terrorism – the latter still a mere phantom on Grimshaw’s horizon.
But Grimshaw, like the Boy Scout he had once been, liked to think himself prepared. Once the appropriate sheet was on his clipboard, he was assured of something vital to a policeman of his hypersensitivity: he knew that he was doing the Right Things in the Right Order. He could not be got at for negligence or inactivity. Even such a ruthless critic as his conscience could not accuse him of culpable omissions.
Called from his slippered television corner – because a Missing Child was a contingency in which he insisted on putting himself at the command-post – he clipped the check-sheet to his millboard, picked up the telephone and held a ball-point poised to tick off Measures Taken as he took them.
Descriptions circulated to mobile patrols – neighbouring forces – hospitals – bus-stops – railway stations – transport cufés –
The list extended to the heart-cramping menace of civilian searchers – dogs – frogmen – and Grimshaw was human enough to enjoy an element of narcissism: Field Marshal Grimshaw coolly directing operations from his Advanced Tactical Headquarters, hampered only by a phalanx of assistant chief constables, the chief himself (who could be guaranteed to misunderstand any report put before him, however simple) a mildly hostile local press and the bulldozing iconoclasts of the media.
Then there was Mosley. Was Mosley going to be an additional obstacle on this case, needing an Action Sheet on his own account? Grimshaw knew that Mosley was in or about Bagshawe Broome. By some new devious stroke, he had contrived to get Beamish with him. Mosley and Beamish cared nothing for what might be on other people’s clipboards. They never operated from clipboards themselves. Their stock in trade was a mish-mash of so-called intuition and the irregular army of undesirables who were their informants. But Mosley and Beamish were known to be in midstream of this spate of thefts from unoccupied premises: it might be days before they even heard of the abduction of Janet Morrison from the middle of their patch. Should Grimshaw leave them in blissful ignorance, thus protecting his own flank from disastrous interference? The answer, alas, was No! Because the next line on the Action Sheet read Local CID. The divisional inspector, in this case Mosley, was entitled to be kept scrupulously informed of all developments. It said so in Grimshaw’s own roneoed typescript, from which there could be absolutely no deviation.
Authorization of overtime – Grimshaw dictated the relevant instruction to a clerk. The system was running sweetly. It was good for a system to be taken out of its steel cupboard from time to time and made to run sweetly. It lubricated the cogs of communication and command.
Moreover, there was always spin-off. In the welter of stimulated activity, other outstanding cases would sometimes be liquidated. In the Findlay case last year, there was a fifty per cent supplement to normal night patrols, but for which a peripatetic gang of cat-stealers would not have been picked up. And Wilby Watson, a borough councillor, would not have been caught urinating in Woolworth’s doorway in Bradburn High Street.
Issue arms to trained marksmen?
Grimshaw hardly thought that the search for Janet Morrison had yet come to that pass.
Mosley and Beamish also had an Action Sheet, in their case written on the back of an old envelope. They were agreed that the Morrison child was not likely to be lodged anywhere in Bagshawe. The decaying labourer’s cottage up Royds Intake was one of two possible refuges that Mosley had marked with a cross, but as he pointed out to Beamish, the Morrison-Bootsie-Kevin Road Show was likely to be laid up during the hours of sleep. To avoid duplicated journeys, it would be as well to work outwards from Bagshawe. So Mosley and Beamish also picked up a few items of spin-off. They noticed that late-night lights were visible in the rear of Veronique’s Boutique. In a boarded-up slum awaiting demolition in Coalpit Street, were several dozen crates of apricot jam, in 7 lb tins, that must have been missed during the haul earlier in the evening. In what used to be the cellar of the old co-op emporium, they found old Sammy War-burton asleep. Mosley advised extreme stealth, lest they wake him.
‘But I heard someone at the station say he’s wanted for theft from a clothes-line,’ Beamish said.
‘Aye, and if we take him in, we shall be stuck with him and his bloody clothes-line half the night.’
Beamish drove them up into hills that forecast one of the emptiest stretches of the Pennines. Luminous eyes stared at them stupefied from the bracken-fringed verges. Baby rabbits, unaccustomed to human presence, did not flee from their approach. Their first stop was an isolated country residence asterisked on Mosley’s envelope: Waterbrigg Hall.
‘Owner’s on the Costa del Sol,’ Mosley said, casually omniscient. ‘If those two haven’t done this place over yet, it won’t be long before it comes up on their list.’
The gates were well padlocked, but a light was on in an upstairs bathroom window: perhaps on a crime prevention officer’s advice.
‘We ought to have contacted the keyholder,’ Beamish said.
‘Well, neither of us thought of that, did we?’
And before Beamish knew that anything was happening, the front door was open, and Mosley was putting something back into his pocket.
‘I won’t tell you who taught me how to do that. He went down for nine months. It would have been two years if I hadn’t told Quarter Sessions how helpful he’d been.’
They trod prudently at first, but there was no one in the place. The central heating system had been programmed to come on for an hour twice a day. Power cuts had put it an hour behind.
‘I can’t help feeling that Kevin and friend have missed a chance here,’ Mosley said. ‘It has to be Royds Intake, then.’
Mosley had known the late occupant of the derelict hovel: Harry Johnson, farm-labourer, widower for three-quarters of his adult life. He had been allowed to stay on in what had once been a tied cottage when the farmer himself had given up. Mosley found Kevin’s tyre-marks in and out again. He found the broken kitchen window, was able to tell from the state of the cracked putty that it was freshly done. He found the evidence – unwashed up – of the meal that had been eaten here, counted three plates.
But the three people were not there. It was 2 a.m. – something over three hours since they would probably have gone to bed. He found the Medical Guide that Janet Morrison had been studying. He found her schoolbag and books. And there were doubtless many Holmes-like deductions that he could have based on the movements of furniture, the disturbance of dust, a dropped hair-grip, Bootsie’s dustbin-liner of underwear and Kevin’s Walkman cassette player. But there was nothing among this trail of trivia that told him where the trio had gone or why. There was still lukewarm water in the kettle, from which he hazarded the time of their supper: a neat calculation, but a futile one. There were no signs of any violence, other than the blood from Kevin’s cut hand. There was nothing to suggest that anyone but the three principals had been here.
So why the sudden departure? It must have been unplanned for them to have left all their belongings – and especially for Kevin to have abandoned his source of music.
‘Perhaps,’ Beamish said, ‘they saw our lights as we came up, and they’ve melted into the environment.’
‘Their car isn’t here,’ Mosley said. ‘If they’d left after they’d seen us, we should have seen them.’
Nevertheless they searched the yard, the coal-bunker, a collapsing henhouse. Nothing. If they had taken to rough country, they could be anywhere. Mosley pushed his homburg to the back of his head.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is a bit of a bugger.’
Miles Morrison woke again, roused by the strain on his bladder, which although distended by years of abuse, was not of that infinite capacity facetiously claimed for it by some of his friends. He was still not conscious enough to connect his surroundings with recent events, but did at this time at least grasp the pattern of them. He recalled his prison sentence of years ago, and he believed that he was still serving it. Then he noticed that the cell door was open, a gesture made on Mosley’s orders to show that he was not under arrest. But he did not see this, thought of it only as a token of the incompetence of the screws.
‘The silly sods!’
He got up, went out into the corridor, found the lavatory and came back to his cell, this time shutting the self-locking door for himself.
The Topladys slept fitfully, and never both at the same time, in the five-foot double bed in which their entire family, five saints and a sinner, had been procreated. Involuntarily, as he tossed, Kitchener threw his arm about Primrose, drawing his chest close to her bosom. She was furious.
‘Kitchener! How could you think of that at a time like this?’
Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw was still ticking off operational orders as he issued them.
Hospitals –
He had just set a detective-constable phoning round. There was confusion about an incident at the Hempshaw Cottage Hospital, whose casualty ward was trying to contact the police at the precise time that the police were trying to contact them. The detective-constable, bewildered by a complex story badly told, introduced complexities of his own as he reproduced for Grimshaw’s benefit what he took to be the gist of it. And Grimshaw, leaping to an unjustified conclusion when the narrative was barely under way, listened with a sense of confusion quite worthy of his chief constable.
‘They can’t have.’
‘They assure me they have, sir.’
‘Sometimes patients discharge themselves, Hollins. But a midnight escape from a children’s ward –’
‘She was not in a children’s ward, sir.’
‘You said she was a child, Hollins.’
‘Yes, sir. But she was not in any ward at all. As I understand it, she was on her way to a ward. With acute appendicitis, sir. And they lost her.’
‘That hospital must be damned careless. Have they informed the next of kin yet?’
‘No, sir. They don’t know who she is.’
‘Ring them again, and get a description, Hollins.’
‘They’ve already given me one, sir.’
And it fitted Janet Morrison to the eyebrows over her shining forehead.
‘I’ll get over there at once,’ Grimshaw said, issuing a plethora of orders that would have been carried out in his absence anyway.
‘We’d better do a round of telephoning,’ Mosley said. ‘Bus stations, railway stations, lorrymen’s pull-ups, hospitals –’
‘Gone to the Costa del Sol for the winter,’ Bootsie said. ‘This will do us a treat. And it’s damned sight better than the last place. The only thing is, there are certain rules. You’ll have to
put yourself in my hands – I’m a practised operator. Some things are obvious, like lights, and keeping away from windows. It’s more than a series of precautions – it’s a way of life.’
‘I’m not a fool, you know.’
Bootsie parted enough of her hair to reveal one piercing eye in its entirety.
‘No. I can see that. You’re a crafty young bitch. And if I hadn’t shot up those hospital stairs five at a time, I’d have lost you. The only difficulty is going to be my mobility. Kevin’s pissed off with the wheels, and if I borrow from a car park, I may be seen driving up here.’
‘Pinch yourself a bike,’ Janet said.
‘You unfeeling young devil. Do you know when I last pedalled up a hill?’
‘It’ll be worth it,’ Janet said. ‘My Dad’s loaded. If he doesn’t think I’m worth five grand, I’ll bloody well leave home.’
Grimshaw parked in a space reserved for consultants, for which there was no competition at this hour. He got out and found himself alongside a blue Escort belonging to the same Force as himself. He could not tell to whom it was on charge. He found his way to the night sister in command of casualty.
‘Well, you see, it was these two. They came in carrying a child, roughly wrapped up in a filthy blanket –’
‘Steady,’ Grimshaw said. ‘Which two?’
‘We don’t know. The duty nurse hadn’t time to ask them their names. She did what I’d have done – she put the patient first. The child was moaning and tossing. Nurse MacMichael put her hand down on her tummy, asked her where it hurt most, and when the child screamed, it left her in no doubt whatever. She had me bleeped, called for a porter, got the child on to a stretcher and into the lift, ready to go up at once to Ward Four. When she went back to the desk, the two who’d brought the girl had gone.’
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 10