by Rhys Bowen
Evan made his way back to the main building, but that too appeared to be locked and deserted. Just as he was walking back to the car, not sure what to do next, he heard the putt-putt of an engine, and a tractor, equipped with mowing blades, came into view between buildings, dropping snippets of newly mown grass as it approached. Evan ran to intercept it. An elderly man with a ruddy, weatherbeaten face, wearing the traditional Welsh farmer’s woolen flat cap, was driving the tractor and looked up in surprise as Evan hailed him.
“Hello, sir. Sorry, the school’s closed for the holidays,” he called.
“I’m with the North Wales Police,” Evan shouted back over the loud popping of the tractor. “Is there anyone here I can speak to?”
The man leaned forward to switch off the motor. “What’s this about then?” he asked.
“A matter of great urgency. Can you tell me where I can contact someone in authority?”
The old man frowned. “The headmistress just left yesterday for her cottage in France and the school secretary’s on holiday with her family.”
“Is there nobody who could answer some questions about girls who attended the school? Someone must have contact numbers for somebody.”
“Hold your horses, young man.” The tractor driver held up his hand in a calming gesture. “There’s the assistant secretary comes in during the week, but today’s Saturday, isn’t it? I suppose you could call her at home and see if she’d come in for you to open up the records.”
“That would be very helpful,” Evan said. “Where would I find her number?”
“The name is Jones,” the man said. “Husband’s Richard. They’ll be in the phone book.”
“Jones? Won’t that be like looking for a needle in a haystack?”
The old man grinned. “We’re on the English side of the border here. Not so many Joneses as where you come from.” He looked at Evan curiously. “What exactly is it you need?”
“I need to find out about girls who attended this school about twelve to fourteen years ago. It’s essential I get the information right now. A—a woman has been kidnapped.” He fought to keep the description impersonal.
“Well, now.” The old man stroked his chin. “You could always ask Miss Posey. I expect she’d be at home.”
“Miss Posey?”
“Latin mistress. She lives on grounds in one of the staff cottages. Over beyond the kitchen garden there.”
“She’s been here longer than twelve years, has she?”
The old man smiled. “They all have. They come here as soon as it’s clear that they’re never going to get hitched and then they stay on until they die. Miss Posey’s pushing seventy, but her mind’s still sharp enough.”
“And she’s in a cottage—” Evan had already started to walk in the direction the old man had indicated.
“Honeysuckle Cottage. The third one along. It’s quicker to walk than to drive. You can cut across the kitchen garden.”
Evan did as he suggested, hurrying between neat rows of runner beans and fat vegetable marrows. Then, on the other side of a tall yew hedge, he came upon a pretty circle of cottages. They must formerly have been occupied by estate workers. Now they were surrounded by well-tended gardens. Honeysuckle was growing profusely over the porch of its namesake cottage and the front garden was a riot of peonies and roses. Evan was about to raise the brass lion’s-head knocker on the front door when a woman’s voice called, “Can I help you?”
He spun around and spotted the small white-haired woman on her knees, weeding a side bed in the shade of the hedge.
“Are you Miss Posey?” Evan asked. “I’m Constable Evans from the North Wales Police and I need to ask some questions about girls who attended this school.”
“Oh dear.” The woman got to her feet a little stiffly. Although she was petite, there was nothing frail about her. Her face was set in the sort of expression a teacher needs when dealing with a classroom of difficult pupils. “You’d better come inside, then. Wait a minute while I make myself respectable.”
She proceeded to take off a large gardening apron and to wash her hands in the water barrel beside the house, drying them on a faded cotton skirt.
“Come in, then,” she said, kicking off muddy gardening clogs at the door and proceeding into the house in stockinged feet. “I expect you’d like a cup of tea.”
“Only if it’s not too much trouble.”
She looked up at him and a smile creased her severe face. “No. It’s teatime. I always take a cup myself at four. You can talk to me in the kitchen while I boil the water.” She led Evan along a dark, narrow hallway lined with bookcases into a simple but immaculate small kitchen. In contrast to the hallway, this room was bathed in afternoon sunlight. The window was wide open and the sound of a thrush floated in, along with the heady smell of roses.
“Sit.” She pointed at a white ladder-backed chair at the table. Evan sat.
“Now. How can I help you?” she asked.
Evan told her. The old woman’s face showed alarm. “Bronwen Price? I remember her well. Bright girl. Went to Cambridge. You suspect she’s been abducted?”
Evan nodded. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“How simply terrible. Was this just a random kidnapping or do you know the motive behind it? I don’t recall that her family was particularly wealthy, not like some of the girls we have here.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Evan said. “I’m trying to discover the motive. The kidnapper has sent some cryptic clues and one of them mentions Deb. This could be a girl’s name, of course, but we can’t seem to come up with anyone called Deborah. My colleague suggested that it might apply to a debutante. I know there aren’t any official debs anymore, but Bronwen said that there were several girls at school with her who fit that description.”
“There certainly were, in her day,” Miss Posey said as the kettle whistled and she turned it off. “Not anymore, of course. We were most selective once. Only the girls of the best families. Now we take anyone who can pay the fees. We’ve even got two girls from Saudi Arabia who insist on walking around in those ridiculous headscarves. I find it most unfair when the rest of our girls have to adhere strictly to the uniform code, but the Head won’t risk offending the father, who is some prince or other and ridiculously wealthy.”
Evan waited, trying to conceal his impatience, while she rambled on.
“So which debs can you think of who were at school with Bronwen? She told me, but my mind was on other things at the time and the names escaped me. One of them was a quite ridiculous hyphenated name—”
“Amanda Fanshaw-Everingham, I believe.” Miss Posey looked up from pouring the water into the teapot. “She’s now the Viscountess Montague, of course.”
“And the other was Penny somebody?” Evan grasped at a fleeting wisp of memory.
“Ah yes. Penny Mowbray. She certainly qualified as a debutante in the old sense. The family was very thick with the royals. Her mother was the daughter of an earl. The father played polo with Prince Philip.” She paused and a smile crossed her face. “Such a naughty girl, but fun.”
“There was some incident in which she and Bronwen stole a car?”
“Oh dear, yes. That dreadful incident with the motorbike. They were so lucky that the man wasn’t hurt more seriously or the police would have had to press charges. Fortunately he walked away with just some bruises and some damage to his hand, I believe, although Penny’s father had to pay for the motorbike.”
“Do you happen to remember the man’s name?”
Miss Posey shook her head. “I don’t think I ever knew it. It was just some tourist who was passing through the area.”
“Do you know what Penny is doing now?”
“She died, poor girl. In her early twenties. Tragic accident. She was passionate about riding, like all her family. Her horse took a tumble and she broke her neck. Such a waste.”
So the deb had died. But in an accident.
“Any other debs you can think
of?” Evan asked. “Any unpleasant incidents while Bronwen was at school—stalkers or a man threatening the girls?”
“Good heavens, no,” she said, then her expression changed. “Strange you should ask that. Penny Mowbray played the violin. One day she came into her room and found her violin smashed to pieces. An extensive inquiry was carried out but the guilty party was never found. Some of us suspected it was a certain girl who was jealous of Penny, but we could never prove anything.”
She put a cup of tea in front of Evan and placed the sugar bowl and milk jug beside him.
“I always believe in letting people help themselves,” she said. “Although I don’t take sugar myself.”
Evan forced himself to drink the tea while Miss Posey prattled on to him. As soon as he had drained the cup, he stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to be going. I’ve got to try and find out more about that motor accident.”
“You don’t think it has anything to do with Bronwen being kidnapped, do you?”
“Right now I’m just clutching at straws,” Evan said, “but this is a straw and it’s the only connection between Bronwen and a deb that I can find.”
He left the cottage, hurried back across the kitchen garden, and was soon driving out through the forbidding gateway. He hadn’t been driving for five minutes when his mobile phone rang.
“Evans, where the hell are you?” Watkins voice echoed through the car.
“On my way in, sir. Be with you shortly,” Evan said.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to be driving.”
“I didn’t want to tie up another officer in waiting on me, sir. I’m doing okay. I had to meet with Bronwen’s parents.”
“I bet that wasn’t a piece of cake.”
“Bloody awful. Any news?”
“Nothing big. But we’ve had Roger Thomas here and your presence would have been useful.”
“Roger Thomas? Did you get anything out of him?”
“Strangely enough, yes. We now know why he lied about where he was that afternoon. He was having it off with the lady park ranger. Diana somebody. Rather ashamed of himself and didn’t want it to get back to his choir.”
In spite of everything, Evan laughed. “Roger and Diana? Good God. That’s something I never would have guessed in a million years.”
“We’re still looking for Rhodri Llewelyn. Get down here if you’re feeling up to it.”
“I’ll be in as soon as I can, sir,” Evan said and hung up, glad that he hadn’t had to reveal where he actually was and what he was actually doing.
There was an elderly sergeant on duty at the closest police station in Leominster.
“An accident twelve or fourteen years ago, you say?” he said in response to Evan’s request. “Was someone killed?”
“No. It wasn’t serious. Some girls, joyriding in a car, hit a man on a motorbike, but he was okay.”
The sergeant’s face showed scorn. “I expect there’s a report on it filed somewhere in the bowels of HQ in Shrewsbury, but we don’t have nothing like that here.”
“I see.” Evan turned to go.
“You probably won’t find anyone in records at the weekend,” the sergeant called after him, seeming to delight in being the bearer of bad news. “They’ve been cutting back on support staff. They’ve cut us down to one officer in the station and one on the beat at weekends too, which is bloody stupid because that’s when people have time for crime. Why don’t you write down the details and I’ll call the request in for you on Monday.”
“Monday?” Evan spun back to him. “This is damn important. A matter of life and death.”
A smile twitched on the sergeant’s lips. “Bit dramatic, wouldn’t you say? But then you Welsh like your drama.”
Evan’s fist curled, longing to hit him. He took a couple of steps toward him, leaning a little too close to be comfortable. “Look you. We have a madman who has kidnapped a young woman—the second woman to disappear in a week. He’d built a bunker with handcuffs in it. He tried to kill me last night, so no, I don’t think that life and death is at all an exaggeration!” The words came spitting out.
The sergeant recoiled. “Sorry, mate. No offense meant. But I seriously think you’ll have little luck in records on a Saturday, even if they’ve kept anything as trivial as a minor accident that long. Your best bet would be the local paper. They publish a weekly police blotter and your accident is likely to have made that, especially if it involved girls from the school.”
“And where’s the local paper?”
“Ludlow. Not quite ten miles from here.”
“Thanks.” Evan ran back to his car. Frustration and tension were building to snapping point. It was like being in one of those board games in which he was constantly drawing the card that sent him back to Start.
Ludlow was busy with Saturday commerce. He had to ask several times before he found the newspaper office, just off the High Street. The girl at the front desk listened with sympathetic ear and pretty soon Evan found himself going through back issues on microfilm.
“It’s all on CD these days.” A buck-toothed cub reporter, who’d been stuck with weekend duty, perched on the edge of the desk, ready to chat. “And we write our columns with one of these publishing programs. Ever so advanced we are, for a small paper.”
Evan just wished he’d go away. Week after week flashed past on the screen. Burglaries, drunk and disorderly, some weeks with nothing at all. A very law-abiding community, it would seem. Then finally he was staring at it.
JOYRIDE ENDS IN NEAR TRAGEDY
Two students from Malvern Priory were involved in a traffic accident on the Wigmore to Knighton road, late on Sunday, the 18th. Their car, which was borrowed without the owner’s permission, struck the motorbike driven by Shrewsbury resident Neville Shorecross, who was passing through the area on a camping trip. Mr. Shorecross was brought to Ludlow Infirmary, kept overnight for observation and then released.
Chapter 25
She woke to light, unbearably bright after hours of darkness. Instinctively, she squeezed her eyes shut and turned away. Her heart jolted in fear as something touched her face. Then she cried out in pain as the tape was ripped away from her mouth. She tried to put her hands up to her burning skin.
Gradually, her eyes were adjusting to the light. She saw now that it came from a trap door above her head. A ladder extended down from it and the hazy form of a person was leaning over her.
“I don’t know why I’m bothering to do this,” said a well-bred voice. “It’s really a waste of time to feed you, when you won’t be around much longer, but I suppose I’m a humane person at heart.”
Bronwen flexed her stiff jaw and felt her lips stinging as she moved them. “Humane? You’re a monster.”
“Here. Drink this.” He held a glass of water up to her lips.
“The last thing you offered me to drink was drugged,” she said.
“This one isn’t.”
She sipped, relishing the water flowing down through her parched mouth.
“Why are you doing this?” she demanded.
He looked surprised. “You must know why you’re here.”
“I have no idea, unless I’m fulfilling some kinky kidnap fantasy.”
“You didn’t notice my reaction when I first heard your name, when you walked into my bank?”
“I noticed nothing.”
“You mean you don’t remember? The accident?”
“Accident?”
“You stole a car. You and that Mowbray girl. You crashed into my motorbike.”
“That was you?”
“It was indeed. You destroyed my life that day.”
“Destroyed your life? They said you weren’t seriously hurt.” Bronwen blinked as she tried to look up at him. Make eye contact. Establish a human connection with the captor. Those were the things one was supposed to do. “You were released from hospital the next morning. Penny’s father paid for your bike.”
“Paid for my bike?” he shout
ed, his face distorted now and eyes bulging with rage. “Paid for my bike? What about my life? Who paid for my life?” He raised his left hand and waved it in her face. “Look at this!”
She noticed that the hand was missing the top of a finger. The ring finger.
“It was severed when your car ran over it.”
“I’m very sorry, but I hardly see that—I mean, I’ve watched you write. You’re right-handed.”
He knelt on the floor, close enough that his breath blew into her face. It was a surprisingly sweet breath as if he’d just cleaned his teeth. “Do you know how many fingers it takes to play the piano? Ten. It takes ten fingers to play the piano. I wanted to be a pianist. I was studying and hoping to get into the Royal Academy of Music.”
“Weren’t you a little old?” she asked, realizing too late that this was probably unwise. “You looked quite grown-up to us, so you must have already been at least in your mid-twenties.”
His face distorted even further. “Yes, I was a little old, but I didn’t grow up with moneyed parents like you. My father worked in a bank. In a stupid bank. They were always poor. Terribly genteel, but always scrimping and saving. They paid for my music lessons while I was growing up, but when I finished school they expected me to go out and earn my living. He got me a job in his bank—expected me to be grateful, to be pleased, to be bloody proud. To go to the Royal Academy, to pursue my piano studies would be frivolous. ‘A waste of time,’ my father called it. He never appreciated my talent.”
“And so you killed him.”
“How astute of you. Yes, I did. I made it look like an accident, of course. Nobody ever suspected. After that I put every second and every penny into my piano studies. One day I would have been good enough to sit the Royal Academy exam and they would have appreciated my talent instantly. Only you spoiled that for me.”
“Penny Mowbray—” She heard her voice waver. “Did you kill her too? Was she the deb?”