‘Describe them to me.’
‘He looked like an escapee from a disco. She had so much hair hanging all round her, you couldn’t tell whether she was coming or going.’
‘And can you describe the girl?’
This was superfluous: she repeated what D C Hollins had reported.
‘So what happened to her?’
‘That’s what has us worried stiff. The porter was distracted because a casualty who’d sawn his thumb off had fainted. And when he turned round again, the lift had gone up. It seems to have stopped at an intermediate floor – the nurses’ cafeteria, as a matter of fact. And the stretcher and the trolley were both empty. That’s all there is to tell.’
‘And do you really think that the child had appendicitis?’
‘She gave that impression. She described all the usual symptoms. She got MacBurney’s point exactly.’
‘She can’t have gone far, then?’
‘I said she gave that impression. Superintendent. None of us examined her. No one had the time. All Nurse MacMichael did was an elementary palpation.’
‘You are suggesting that she was putting it on?’
‘I can’t say whether she was or wasn’t. We had less than two minutes in which to reach any conclusion at all.’
By the time Grimshaw reached the consultants’ white lines again, the blue Escort had gone. Mosley did not believe in risking the formality of a nursing sister where as voluble a source as a night porter was available.
‘It looks as if she’s given them the slip,’ Sergeant Beamish said. ‘I suppose we’d better check whether she’s gone home.’
‘Do that, Sergeant Beamish. Then I think we might have a go at picking up Kevin Toplady.’
‘And the girl. Don’t you think she’ll be with him?’
‘Probably not for the next hour or two. He’ll go back for his radio. Bound to. Can’t live without it.’
‘What does it feel like, having it in?’ Janet asked.
‘Don’t you ever think of anything else, you disgusting little horror?’ Bootsie said.
‘Don’t you ever do anything else?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough. How old are you?’
‘I’m thirteen. And two girls in my class have found out already.’
‘And what did they think of it?’
‘They didn’t like it much. They’re both drips.’
‘Maybe they are, maybe they’re not. I used to think I knew who were the drips in this world. Nowadays I’m not so sure.’
‘You must be going off a bit, to start talking like that.’
‘O.K. then. You want to know what it’s like the first time. You think he’s coming at you with a bloody telegraph pole, that’s what it’s like. Then when you’re just beginning to relate to it, you find he hasn’t got a telegraph pole – only a fag-end of chewed-up garden hose. That’s what it’s like.’
‘You’ve got it bad over Kevin, haven’t you? He looks such a clot to me.’
‘You’d better keep your opinions to yourself, young lady, if you don’t want my hand to slip.’
‘Well, you must think there’s something more to him than his what-not. He finished too soon last night, didn’t he? I heard through the wall.’
‘What do you expect with you hammering and shouting? Many a man wouldn’t have been able to do anything.’
‘My mum and dad have been married twenty-three years and he still never lasts more than five minutes. I hear them every time they do it.’
‘I wonder what you and your friends ever find to talk about?’
‘He must be a clot,’ Beamish said. ‘Just look at the light that he’s showing.’
An unshaded bulb was switched on behind an uncurtained upper window up Royds Intake. Beamish said afterwards that they ought to have been put on their guard by the fact that the radio was not playing. Except for the arhythmical orchestration of gutters, loose window-frames, leaking water and bits of hanging wire that were tapping and rattling, the house was in silence. Beamish and Mosley rushed up to the lighted bedroom, following the infantry theory that a hostile house is best searched from the top. They found no one there. All the things – Janet’s school-bag, Bootsie’s grubby underlinen and Kevin’s Walkman had gone, and they had hardly had time to take this in when they heard a car start up, further up the hill, along the lane-end that merged with the moors – a section of road that no one else had used tonight. The vehicle went pelting down the hill without lights. Kevin must either have seen or heard them coming. It was a simple trick that he had played.
‘Maybe he’s not such a clot,’ Mosley said.
Beamish went charging down the stairs, out of the front door and along the garden path.
‘Waste of time,’ Mosley told him. ‘With the choice of roads he’s got a mile lower down, we don’t stand a chance. I hate to say this. Brother Beamish, but sooner or later we are going to be invited to give an account of ourselves to Brother Grimshaw.’
Chapter Fourteen
Miles Morrison was wakened, gingerly, by the least experienced constable in the division, who had been sent down with a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich and to tell him that he was free to go after the desk-sergeant had had a word with him. Morrison recoiled from the sandwich and began to remember. A terrifying picture assembled itself. He rushed up to the outer office.
‘Will somebody tell me what’s going on? Have you found my Janet yet? And if you haven’t, why are there three of you hanging about in here?’
Sergeant Hammond was a diplomat manque.
‘I’m very sorry, Mr Morrison. We have not found your daughter yet. Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw, the most senior detective in the Force, has taken personal charge. Every available man is deployed, men have been called in from their days off, the Manchester boys are working with us, as are the West Riding and the County Boroughs. We have dogs out, an army battalion from Preston and two helicopters from Air-Sea Rescue.’
Miles did not look convinced.
‘Why is this happening to me of all people?’ he asked.
‘I think I can honestly say that we have had every available resource applied to his case since eight-thirty yesterday evening,’ Grimshaw said. ‘All except for two officers, who ought to have been the most closely involved, and who could not be found at the critical hour: two officers who appear to have forgotten that the gravest transgression in any police force in the world, from Wogga Wogga to Moscow Central, is to try to go it alone.’
He stopped, to see what their faces were saying. Beamish was standing at parade-ground attention. Even Mosley had the courtesy to be standing still. But nothing in his expression suggested that he had been listening.
‘Have you anything to say, inspector?’
‘Nothing,’ Mosley said, as if that in itself was a statement of substance.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Only that I think you are being less than fair, sir.’
‘I am being professional, Sergeant Beamish, which I seem to remember was one of the hallmarks of your work until I allowed you to fall into misleading company.’
‘We had to come to a decision on the spur of the moment. We would have lost track, if we had come back to report.’
‘And what have you done as matters stand, but lose track, Sergeant Beamish? You have caused us all to lose track.’
‘Moreover, sir, I submit that it is hardly professional –’
‘Moreover, Sergeant Beamish, I prefer not to be lectured on professionalism from the eminence of three stripes.’
Grimshaw was doing his best to maintain the momentum of his severity, but had an uncomfortable feeling that he was not doing very well at it.
‘And moreover, for the remainder of today, the pair of you will work on one case until such time as you have completed it. you will carry out a teasel-thorough search of the Holgates’ domestic premises. You will compare his possessions with every stolen property list for the last five years, and you will produce enough evidence to su
pport a receiving charge.’
Beamish’s poker face was now as unrevealing as Mosley’s. Mosley even looked as if he were devoid of average intelligence.
‘And Sergeant Beamish –’
‘Sir –’
Beamish’s eyes were focused on a spot on the wall well above Grimshaw’s face level.
‘Oh, get out of my sight,’ Grimshaw said. ‘There’s a warrant, by the way, to turn the Holgates’ place over.’
‘There used to be,’ Mosley said, when they were out of Grimshaw’s office, and treading a safer corridor, ‘a wartime expression much favoured by exuberant young men such as fighter pilots, rear gunners and the like. They used to say Whack-oh! when presented with any unexpected stroke of fortune. I say Whack-oh! Sergeant Beamish.’
‘Indeed?’
Rebukes always disturbed Beamish, just or unjust.
‘Whack-oh! Sergeant Beamish, we are now entitled to spend the whole day with the Holgates if we wish. But I take it we prefer to spend the day following our own inclinations?’
Miley was bewildered by what happened when he entered his house. His Emily was normally so submissive that he was in danger of hating her for it. For the first two minutes after his return to his hearth, she said nothing at all.
‘I’ve just came back from the copper shop –’
He said it as if they had called him in for specialist consultation.
‘Aye. The copper shop. Your only daughter stolen in the street, and your answer is to get drunk and incapable. If you ask me it isn’t only money somebody wants, though we shall be having to find more of that than we’ve got. It’s to teach you a lesson – for trying to be what you never were. For boring people stiff with your big-headed ideas. For bragging all over the place about what you’ve got in the bank.’
He crept out of the house again. The pubs were not yet open, otherwise he would have gone in for a hair of the dog and probably ended up paralytic again by midday. There was nothing for it but to repair to his magisterial spot on the Market Place – something that he felt strangely unwilling to do, for he did not need to be told how much face he had lost. He had been taken for a ride and had no solution. He knew that he could not call a posse of his cronies round him and issue them with short, sharp orders. He could think of no orders to issue.
He went to the Market Place nevertheless. His spot was still vacant. In his bleakest moments he had even pictured some bastard attempting a takeover: at least, that would have meant a thumping match he knew he could not lose.
His lieutenants were dotted about the square, looking oddly like mere loafers this morning. He took up his position. Some men took a step or two forward. Some braced their shoulders. Others followed suit. A man who was not entitled by protocol to sit on the horse-trough got up and retreated with sheepish discretion to the asylum of a shop doorway.
The life of Bagshawe Broome went on around them. The Pakistani dustman heaved a bin into the truck. The accountant of one of the High Street banks crossed the street and went into Veronique’s Boutique. Miley glowered, waited. Then he had an idea. He beckoned Ben Eagle with a meaningful head-jerk and the two both went to the trough.
While Bootsie was out of the grounds, Janet removed all the dust-covers from the drawing-room furniture, which Bootsie had specifically forbidden her to do. She dumped the bulky cloths in a morning-room. The drawing-room was chintzy and needed a fire in the hearth. She sat in various armchairs, divans and chesterfields in turn, on the edges of them at first, but settling back eventually into vastnesses from which she could only get up again by swinging her legs violently.
She went over to one of the bookcases, examined The Joy of Sex, a paperback guide to relaxation and a prestige edition of the Decameron in a tooled leather binding. It was the latter that she took to read. But something was happening to the light reflected in the panel of the bookcase. She jumped guiltily backwards and saw that two cars had stopped for someone to open the gate and that the first of them was now entering the drive. She darted out of the room and flew up the main staircase. Enter Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw, accompanied by one detective-sergeant, two plain-clothes men dressed as if to infiltrate a ring of drug-pushers, one uniformed constable and the embarrassed and respectable keyholder.
‘They’re cracking on they’re pulling all the stops out,’ Miley said to Ben Eagle. ‘Trying to make out they’d do as much for me as they would for Lord Muck. I’ll believe that when it happens. And I’ll tell you what: whatever they do to the bastard will be nothing to what will happen when I get my hands on him. If they give him ten years, I’ll be waiting for him when he comes out.’
Then he saw that a figure was standing, patiently polite, some fifteen yards from him, waiting for the conversation to be over. Miley knew the man: Allen Durkin, one of Bagshawe’s resident detective-sergeants.
‘Could I have a word, Mr Morrison?’
Durkin had had words with him many times in the past, but this was the first time he had ever called him Mr.
‘Detective-Superintendent Grimshaw wants to know if you’ve received any demand for money yet.’
‘Not unless it’s been delivered at home in the last half-hour.’
‘The moment you do, let us see it at the station, please. Don’t in any circumstances part with any money or come to any arrangements. Do you get that?’
Miley’s natural reaction was not to get anything that issued from Sergeant Durkin’s lips. But he remembered the figure of Janet waiting for her bus.
‘I get it all right. When are you lot going to do something about it?’
It was only a few minutes’ walk to the Holgates’ home, but Mosley insisted on their being driven there. Beamish’s inner spirit quailed at the magnitude of the task that Grimshaw had set them – and even more at Mosley’s implication that they were not going to do it.
Avril Holgate looked like a woman not at all happy to see them, but making a brave show of concealing her feelings. Mosley asked to use her telephone and rang for a taxi to come for them here. Then he struck up an absurd bid at small talk about the effects of the first frosts on nasturtium vines.
‘Mr Mosley – is there something –?’
But now their taxi was at the door and Mosley was on his feet saying goodbye. He had not mentioned the search warrant.
‘You don’t think it’s necessary to carry out the detective-superintendent’s instructions, then?’ Beamish said.
‘They’ve been carried out. Hasn’t young Holgate been through his stock item by item? Who’d know better than he does where it all came from? I had to put enough pressure on him until he did it, and I’m buggered if I’m going about doing big jobs twice. Or little ones, either, for Tom Grimshaw’s amusement. You and I have better things to do. I shall happen get it in the neck for using a squad car to come quarter of a mile, but at least that proved to Grimshaw that we’re turning Dickie Holgate’s dump over.’
Grimshaw did not see his way to sending a man to Ripon to lift a corner of the veil behind which Bootsie Bateman’s parents had their being. The assignment fell to WPC Mary Carlyon, from the local station, to whom it appealed, because it was the first time for some weeks that she had done anything but exercise unglittering vigilance over the perils besetting bored market-town adolescents.
She went at breakfast time, formally observed in the dining-room. Bateman claimed that he could tell which of his clerks ate at their kitchen tables: you could smell the bacon fat in their clothes.
She chose breakfast time because she knew there would be tight timing in which she could create the maximum embarrassment and tactical advantage. She could also picture Bateman’s office, the image of working pressures, his exhibitionist command of a hard-pressed team. They would be interrupted by telephone calls. There would be the shortest of intervals before his next appointment. A secretary would enter the room, look dismayed and go away again. His eye would keep wandering down to mail already opened for him.
He was a tax consultant: the
world of difference had to be noted between tax avoidance and tax evasion. He was a man of reliable habits: at twenty past eight, halfway through his third cup of tea, he would be needing to go to the lavatory.
Mary Carlyon had said immediately that she had come about their daughter Elizabeth. Bateman had at once recited what was obviously his standard disclaimer: the young woman was of age. She had had everything made. No pressure had ever been put on her to do anything that she did not want to do. (He did not list those things that she might have wanted to do and that he had scathingly discouraged.)
‘I’m afraid it is not given to a mere mortal like me to understand the workings of mind of a young lady who has had every opportunity, social, educational and personal.’
Mrs Bateman looked as if she was in fear of an eruption that might put her husband’s vascomotor system at risk. She was wearing a long quilted housecoat in royal blue and pressed a cup of Earl Grey tea on the WPC.
‘Having said that, she knows she has a home to come back to, a bedroom in which nothing has been disturbed since she left: her books, her gramophone records, even her dolls and school exercise books. She has only to give us one little assurance: that she will respect our standards.’
Which included, WPC Carlyon noted, the annual Conservative Association Ball, fake horse-brasses, wall-plates bearing reproductions of Dickensian inns and a brochure for a bridge-playing guest-house party on the North Wales Coast.
‘Do you know her present whereabouts?’ Mary Carlyon asked.
‘We have not been accorded that privilege.’
‘Or her associates?’
Edmund Bateman shuddered.
‘When was she last home?’
The policewoman’s Cornish accent lent, oddly enough, a sense of piquant realism to the conversation: she was so far outside the Batemans’ orbit, and yet so closely involved in its detail.
‘She has not really lived here since the end of her college career. That is to say at the end of her first and only year at that long-suffering establishment. We have been honoured by the occasional and fleeting visit, some of them lasting as long as twenty minutes. By some curious coincidence, she has always been back when she has wanted something. Camping equipment it was once – something left over from her schooldays. Another time she came from a far corner of the country to collect a recording by a group called, I think, the Stones.’
What Me, Mr Mosley? Page 11