Guilty Waters

by Priscilla Masters

  He felt sweaty when he thought about the two men two doors and a short corridor away, still eating their breakfast but probably plotting their next step to find their friends. Perhaps they were still whispering about him. Barker twitched. When were they going to leave? OK, tonight was just one more night. But what if they asked to stay yet another night? What if …? What if they never went? He looked up.

  James was standing in the doorway, plates in hand. He grinned. ‘Thought we’d give you a hand as you’re on your own.’

  Barker paled and felt himself go all dizzy. Automatically, he stretched out his hand and took the plates.

  ‘Thank you,’ he managed and, as he’d known he would, James spotted the rucksacks. How could he have missed them? They stood as obvious as Stonehenge.

  ‘I’m minding them for a couple who’ve gone into Stoke for the day,’ he explained, realizing it didn’t sound credible, even to him.

  ‘Nice,’ James said, and returned to the dining room.

  Barker waited until he’d heard them clomping back upstairs then tore off a piece of kitchen roll, held it under the tap and sat at his table, holding the compress to his forehead.

  He wanted them to go. Now. Right now. He regretted not lying and telling them he was fully booked for the foreseeable future. For ever, actually. He had bad vibes about them. There was something about the way the taller of the two men had studied him, as though he was looking right through him, that made Barker shiver. Go, he wanted to shout. Go right now.

  He looked again at the rucksacks. One was khaki, the other dark blue. They were large, with metal frames. Heavy. He knew that because he’d had to lug them down the stairs. Get them out of the way. Remove them. Otherwise he could never have let the room again. It would have been a waste. So he’d packed them up and put them somewhere out of sight. For a month they had stayed in his cellar, at the bottom of the steps. Recently he’d felt compelled to bring them up the steps, but he’d never opened them.

  Was there anything inside which would incriminate him? he wondered. Gingerly he undid the dark blue buckle on the closest one. Barker was not a big man. That had been part of the reason why he had been bullied and teased at school. Both his size and something about his timid character had alienated his peer group from him. That plus the domineering mother who had been in such evidence around the small boy. He lifted the top, and an evocative scent wafted out. He closed his eyes, breathed it in and remembered. Supi-yaw-lat had seen much that night. Giggling girls with tanned skin, tiny white marks where small bikinis had been. He breathed in perfume, soap and deodorant. And an underlying scent of woman. Unmistakably woman. He looked down to a pair of jeans. Neatly folded. When they had gone out for that last day and he had heard them laughing and talking all the way down the drive, he had entered their room and lifted one corner of the jeans up. It had been hot enough for shorts that day. Underneath the jeans, in a little more of a higgledy piggledy pile, had lain some underwear. Underwear. He had smiled and involuntarily his fingers had stroked the soft material. It was nice underwear. He’d heard French girls wore nice underwear but it had been his first chance to find out if it was true. The bra was purple and soft with spiky lace, and there’d been matching panties. Barker dug his hands in now and felt something else silky. A nightdress?

  He dug in a little more, careful not to disturb the neat packing, and pulled out a packet of contraceptive pills. He knew exactly what they were. All the days of the week. Out of this packet, the last one taken was Friday. Saturday and Sunday still waited. Barker touched them. Should he destroy the evidence which told a story so clearly? Better not. He recalled seeing the packet of pills. They had lain at the side of a toothbrush in the bathroom on the bedside cabinet. People staying in B&Bs leave plenty of clues as to their characters. He had seen these and known the girls were available. He’d smiled at them at the breakfast table knowing that he knew intimate facts about his two guests. He knew things about all the people who stayed here in the rooms people thought of, temporarily, as their own private places. But they weren’t. Not really – even temporarily. They were his. He would reclaim them when they had gone. And somebody else would come.

  He recalled Annabelle carrying the navy rucksack the first time he had seen her. And her silky hair. It had been the first thing he’d noticed about her. Her long, straight, shining silky hair. The colour wasn’t great. Not black like his lady, but brown. In fact, a sort of disappointing mousey brown. But it had been the texture which had drawn him.

  ‘Ye-es,’ he’d said.

  ‘Avez-vous.’ She had laughed, showing a tiny gap between her incisors. ‘Sorry, do you have a room?’ Her accent had been unmistakably French, the ‘r’ bubbling from the back of her mouth, somewhere near the tonsils. ‘For we – two,’ she had added hopefully. ‘Not trop … not too expensive,’ she had corrected quickly.

  He had warmed to the girl …

  He heard a noise. One of the brothers – he hadn’t quite distinguished between them, the taller one – was downstairs again poring over the visitors’ book, now copying something down from it. Barker moved into the hallway and cleared his throat – a dry scrape of a noise that sounded guilty.

  The guy was grinning at him, his finger on a page in July. ‘I’m going to try this mobile number. I didn’t write it down before.’

  Barker swallowed. He had to get rid of the rucksacks.

  Perhaps he could … drop them into someone’s wheelie bin. But all the wheelie bins he knew were always full well before bin day. And if they happened to notice him with two large rucksacks them they might well call the police in. Besides which, only one at a time would fit into a bin. That meant two wheelie bins.

  He could … burn them. People had bonfires, didn’t they? All that would be left would be the metal frame. Yes, this sounded a good idea. He liked this one best. Then his spirits dampened. Someone might see the fire. And the police could gather much evidence from charred remains.

  Take them down the dump? Two weeks ago he had struggled with a stained mattress. One of the men who ran the recycling centre had come up to him, taken down his car number plate and informed him that the recycling centre was being taken over by a private contractor and that in future the rubbish would be monitored. Not such a good idea, then.

  It was tricky and a challenge. But blindly, all Barker really knew was that had to get rid of the evidence. If he didn’t it would incriminate him. Big time. But maybe he could divert suspicion. Barker had an idea.

  Joanna and Mike had spent three hours checking up on the girls’ details, staring into computer screens and making a couple of phone calls. Mike had stumbled through a terse call in ‘Franglais’ first of all to Madame Caron, who had told him that her daughter had not been in touch but that she was not worried unduly. ‘She’s a big girl,’ she had said. ‘She does not have to be talking to her maman every day.’

  Korpanski had pushed. ‘When did you last talk to her?’

  There was a pause before Renée had responded. ‘Sometime in July, as far as I remember. I am not worried, monsieur. Dorothée will turn up just like you say in the UK … a bad penny. Mais oui?’

  There was nothing Korpanski would have liked better than to respond with an equal surety and affirmative sentiment, but the truth was that as he watched Joanna come up with an equally negative response, he felt his pulse quicken. There was something in this. These girls really were missing. But from where?

  By three o’clock they’d updated each other.

  ‘Nothing,’ Joanna said. ‘No mobile phone used since mid-July, no signal since then. No money drawn out of Annabelle’s account. Nothing.’

  ‘Same here,’ Korpanski agreed. ‘Nothing gone from Dorothée’s either.’

  ‘So we have to put out two missing person’s reports and do a bit more digging.’ Joanna looked out of the window. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘It looks a lovely day. Fancy a trip to Staffordshire’s seaside?’

  ‘I take it you mean Rudyard.’

 
; ‘Yeah. I’ll drive. And I’ll even buy you an ice cream if you’re a good boy.’

  Korpanski started laughing and they left the station in high spirits.

  This, after all, was the job they were paid to do.

  EIGHT

  It being a week day and duller and cooler than the weekend there were few boats on the lake, just a couple of sturdy men in Canadian canoes making good headway. It was much quieter than before but the ice-cream stall was still open, the eager-faced boy patently hoping to sell a large ‘ninety-nine’ to the burly sergeant and his companion.

  Korpanski eyed the lake. ‘You know what, Jo, we don’t know they vanished from here.’

  She gave him a sharp look. ‘This is the last place we know they were.’

  Korpanski shrugged. ‘OK. So where do we start?’

  ‘It’s obvious.’ Joanna grinned at him.

  The hotel was still open all day so they simply walked in and took a look around. Rudyard Hotel was a sturdy Victorian building which had recently had a facelift and was very much open for business.

  As they walked in, they caught the eye of one of the staff members and Joanna spotted a name tag: Sarah Gratton. They walked straight up to her.

  Joanna flashed her ID card and Sarah gave a watery smile in response. Right.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’ she asked silkily, a note of sarcasm leaching any politeness or pleasantness out of the phrase. Not those French girls again?

  Joanna flipped the photographs on to the bar. ‘Have you seen these girls?’

  Sarah frowned and looked up. ‘You’re the second lot of people in the last couple of days to ask about these two.’ She looked up. ‘French, aren’t they?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So what is it about them?’

  ‘We’re just trying to find them.’

  Behind her Korpanski put in, ‘So who were the first, love?’

  The barmaid’s gaze softened as she met Korpanski’s dark eyes. As many women did, she immediately morphed into a coquette. ‘Couple of fit-looking climbers,’ she said, flashing a smile at him.

  ‘Know their names, love?’

  Inwardly Joanna gave a groan. Oh, let Korpanski get on with it. She gave a tut of irritation – which neither her sergeant nor the flirting barmaid took the slightest notice of.

  ‘I don’t think I ever heard their names,’ Sarah said, smiling more broadly. ‘I’ll try and think about that one, see if I can remember,’ she purred.

  When would they learn? Joanna fumed. Korpanski was a married man – not up for sale. He was devoted to Fran, Ricky and Jocelyn. But he was adept at using his obvious charms to get what he wanted – particularly out of witnesses. Female witnesses. Men tended to perceive his powerful frame as a threat. Inwardly, Joanna smiled. Quite right, too.

  But as he was doing so well she should probably let him continue.

  ‘When were they asking, love?’

  ‘A couple of days ago.’ The eye contact between the two of them was cringeworthy. Sweet and sickly as a river of treacle.

  She intervened. ‘What did they ask?’

  Reluctantly Sarah Gratton tore her eyes away from Korpanski and focused instead on the inspector. ‘Said they were friends of theirs and asked if I’d seen them.’

  ‘And had you?’

  Sarah Gratton shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, still frowning. ‘At least, if I did I don’t remember.’

  Korpanski pursued the point. ‘Ever?’

  ‘I seem to remember a couple of French girls coming in here once or twice back in the summer, but that was a couple of months ago.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘July, I think.’ Her eyes swivelled towards the corner of the lounge bar. ‘They’d order their food and sit over there.’

  Joanna pressed the point. ‘Were they these girls?’

  ‘Look, I really don’t know. I couldn’t be sure.’ She met the inspector’s fierce gaze. ‘They might have been,’ she capitulated.

  ‘And did you ever see the pair of climbers with them?’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think I’d ever seen the climbers before.’ She returned her gaze to Korpanski. ‘And I would have remembered such a fine pair of guys.’ Her grin was teasing and challenging and Joanna smiled, suddenly seeing the funny side of things because Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski, happily married father of two, was blushing.

  ‘Did you ever see any men with them?’

  ‘No. They were always on their own. They kept themselves to themselves, simply ordered their food and drinks and sat on their own.’ She shrugged. ‘They were often reading from a book.’ She frowned. ‘Poetry, I think.’ Again she appealed to Korpanski rather than to Joanna. ‘But it gets ever so busy here in the summer. Kids running in and out, the boat people, trippers, sightseers. You know.’ Again she shrugged, as though wishing she could wash her hands of this subject.

  Joanna picked up on something. ‘They weren’t staying here then?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘Do you know where they were staying?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure they were staying at Barker’s place.’

  ‘Barker’s place?’

  ‘Mandalay. It’s out on the road that leads up to Biddulph Moor. A sort of upmarket bed and breakfast.’

  Joanna glanced at Mike. She was conscious of the fact that when they returned to the police station at some point Cécile Bellange would turn up again and ask for news of her daughter. And what could she tell her? Only what she already knew – that the two girls had been here.

  Have you any news of my boy Jack?

  Not this tide.

  When d’you think he’ll come back?

  Not with this wind blowing and this tide.

  It was the only answer she could give the woman: not this tide. She looked at the girl. Was this a dead end, as it appeared?

  ‘Anything else you can think of that might help us find them? You didn’t hear them say where they were heading next?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘No. Sorry.’

  They used the well-turned phrase as Joanna handed over her card. ‘Well, if you do remember something …’

  Sarah made one last effort. ‘Yes,’ she said, smiling and looking straight at Mike, ‘if I do think of anything, you can be sure I’ll be right back in touch.’

  You’re wasting your time, love, Joanna wanted to say, but didn’t. They left, both feeling that they’d missed something – something that Sarah had said that they should have pursued and hadn’t.

  It was the climbers. Just because Sarah hadn’t seen the four together, it was still a lead they should have gone after. Two guys asking for the two girls. What did they know – or think?

  ‘Mandalay,’ she said.

  Korpanski turned to look at her. ‘So,’ he said dubiously.

  ‘So … “By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,”’ Joanna quoted, ‘“There’s a Burma girl a’settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me. Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”’ She grinned at Mike. ‘It’s a Kipling poem, Mike.’ She couldn’t resist teasing him. ‘Didn’t you study Kipling at school?’

  ‘No,’ he said stolidly.

  ‘Never heard of The Jungle Book?’

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘was Disney.’

  ‘Not originally. It was Rudyard Kipling. Who also wrote “Mandalay”. Agreed?’

  They took the back road out of Rudyard, taking the higher road rather than the road to the lake. It was a steep climb through a wooded narrow lane until they reached a driveway with a Vacancies sign dangling from a chain, rattling ever so slightly in the breeze. The gate stood open, inviting them along the rhododendron-lined drive. Mandalay was a large, Victorian house, well kept, with plenty of parking. Currently only two cars were there, a red Mazda sports car and a five-year-old Volvo, dark green and mud-spattered. As they pulled on to the drive the view opened up and they realized that the felling of trees be
tween Mandalay and the lake which had happened in the late spring had opened out the view to its advantage. The long lawn sloped downwards, and although the lake was far below it had the effect of being an extension of the garden. At the front of the house was a flat terrace with tables and chairs. The place looked elegant and well cared for. And yet … did it hide a secret? Had the two girls disappeared from here?

  ‘Nice,’ Joanna said approvingly, then glanced at Mike, who was also staring admiringly at the house. Joanna had always had a soft spot for Rudyard with its lake and air of Victorians at play. The lake itself had the atmosphere of a holiday destination and she had always shared the Kiplings’ enthusiasm for the place.

  Korpanski was out of the car, looking down at the water, which today in the stiff breeze sported white horses and almost threatening-looking waves. Not a great day for canoeing, he thought, watching the canoeists toss and tumble in the spray. They were obviously enjoying themselves.

  Mike gave a chuckle. ‘We used to bring the kids here, to Rudyard,’ he said, ‘for a treat when they were little. They just loved the little train that goes up and down the valley. We used to bring our bikes here as well. There’s a good cycle track down there that leads to a nature reserve.’

  ‘Not so nice now they’re teenagers?’ Joanna ventured.

  Korpanski looked at her sharply. He knew exactly what she was searching for: a negative attitude to children. And he wasn’t going to give it to her.

  ‘Equally nice,’ he said firmly, stepping forwards, ‘but different.’

  His words had set Joanna thinking. Would she and Matthew bring their child here too to sit on the undersized train, eat ice cream, sail a dinghy up and down the lake? Would they bring picnics and walk to a grassy quiet spot to eat? Cycle along the track? Would they? She couldn’t picture it. Why not?