Guilty Waters

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘Mr Barker,’ Joanna began. ‘You do remember the two French girls who stayed here back in July?’

  Barker nodded. He’d made a mistake. A silly mistake. And now he was going to pay for it. He waited for the axe to fall. He was pouring out clammy sweat. Looking at the faces of the two detectives, the blunt, strong features of the man and the determined face of the inspector he knew now that whatever he said they were not going to believe him. His mouth was dry. He needed to think. To work this out. But he couldn’t. Panic was mushing his brain.

  ‘The girls left,’ he insisted stubbornly, desperation making his voice squeaky. ‘They left here. I don’t know where they went.’ His story was perfectly credible, his gaze shy, his eyes moving around the room, flitting like a butterfly searching for somewhere to land. He didn’t find it. There was nowhere safe for him.

  His smile was begging them to believe him. He looked from one to the other, wondering which one would be most likely to.

  Joanna was finding that she wanted to believe him. But was this clever manipulation on his part? Korpanski was standing, as he always did, in the doorway, arms akimbo, legs apart, blocking any idea of flight that Barker might have had.

  ‘They left,’ he said again in his voice soft as slippers. ‘I don’t know why you’ve come back here when we heard they’d gone to London.’

  Joanna gave Mike a swift warning look. Don’t tell him.

  Barker continued looking from one to the other, questioning with that bland, almost innocent smile.

  She wanted to see the peephole for herself and dent his confidence. ‘Do you mind if we take a quick look around, Mr Barker – perhaps in the room the girls slept in?’

  ‘I’ve cleaned it many times since they’ve left. You won’t find anything there, Inspector.’

  Oh yes I will, Mr Barker.

  ‘Is it OK if we go in there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Barker so wanted them to believe he was innocent. And leave him alone. For ever. ‘Of course. I’ll take you up there myself.’

  ‘Thank you.’ They tramped up the stairs behind him.

  Barker stood in the doorway while Joanna glanced casually round the walls. Now that Martin had told them of the existence of the peephole they couldn’t think how they’d missed it before. It was so obvious. How come no one but the brothers had picked up on it? Perhaps it was the arrangement of the lights, situated at the far end of the room, facing away from the picture, two bedside lamps quite dim with dark red shades which must have dimmed them even further, and the spotlights in the ceiling were angled away from Miss Wong or whatever her name was.

  She didn’t want to make it too obvious so she signalled to Mike to keep Barker occupied in the doorway while she examined it closer. She couldn’t quite put her eye to it without Barker seeing but she went up close and was tempted to put her finger into the small hole.

  Barker was watching her carefully.

  ‘It’s quite a painting,’ she said – for something to say.

  ‘It’s a print,’ he responded in his flat-fish voice.

  She drew back. ‘And the room next to this?’

  ‘Just a sort of box room,’ Barker said, twisting his hands together now. ‘I keep old stuff there. Suitcases and things.’ How could he have been so foolish?

  For some stupid reason he’d thought that putting the rucksacks in there would be a good idea. Amongst other luggage. Like hiding a branch in a forest or a needle in a workbox.

  And now he could kick himself.

  Joanna’s antennae were up. She sensed a kill. ‘Old stuff?’ she asked innocently. ‘Any chance we could take a look?’

  ‘If I can find the key.’ He stomped off.

  Perhaps it was her imagination but looking around the bedroom Joanna thought she could pick up the scent of expensive French perfume. Chanel? Yves St Laurent? Though she could smell it she couldn’t identify it. It was vague, insubstantial. Lingering. And impossible that the scent was anything but her imagination.

  Too many people must have stayed here since for the girls’ perfume to linger – if it even was their perfume. In fact, Joanna realized now, the room was currently occupied – by another woman, it appeared.

  Barker was back with the key and looking very uncomfortable. He was mouth breathing – shallow, panicky adenoidal breaths that smelt of cups of tea.

  Joanna watched him as he turned the key of the box room, switched on the light and stood back. At first she was only aware of the scent – the same, pleasant, underlying scent. Then she saw them, leaning against the wall. He should have put them in a better place.

  Silly, silly me. And now he was in trouble.

  The inspector was looking at him, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘I needed the room.’ It was all he could think of to say. ‘They left them behind.’ Even to him the explanation sounded limp and lame.

  Detectives usually have a pair of latex gloves somewhere on their person. Joanna fumbled in her pocket, pulled a pair out and slipped them on. She handled the rucksack closest to her and knew she hadn’t been mistaken about the scent. She recalled someone from the pub.

  ‘She ’ad a blue rucksack. Huge thing, it were.’

  ‘Mr Barker,’ she said very carefully, ‘this isn’t your rucksack, is it? Whose is it?’

  He practically fainted with terror. He felt dizzy and unable to breathe. His mouth was too dry to talk. ‘One of the girls,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Like I said, they left them behind.’

  She nodded past it. ‘And the other one?’

  Barker’s head nodded another affirmative.

  Joanna’s heart sank as she glanced at Korpanski. Now they had a fully blown case. The girls wouldn’t have managed a day without their rucksacks, let alone weeks. She looked at Barker, who had all the appearance of a guilty man. This was damning evidence. And Rush would be breathing right down her neck all the way through it. Make a slip, one wrong move and … She could almost drag her finger along her neck. Shit, she thought, catching Mike’s eye.

  ‘Mr Barker,’ she said, quite gently, ‘I think you should come down to the station and talk to us, don’t you?’

  Barker nodded then looked up. ‘But I’ve got a guest,’ he protested.

  She glanced again at Korpanski. His face, she was sure, reflected hers. Grim as a gulag.

  ‘They’ll have to stay somewhere else,’ she said. ‘I suggest you leave a key out and stick a note to the door.’

  Barker didn’t seem to realize this place would soon be crawling with police. No one would want to stay here. But he didn’t seem to have picked up on this. He grumbled a string of complaints as he made preparations to leave Mandalay.

  ‘How long will I be?’

  This time it was the sergeant who answered. ‘As long as it takes, Mr Barker.’

  He was obsessional in his locking up. He left a key in an envelope and stuck it on the door with a name, Charlotte Bingley, carefully written in block capitals on the front. She must be the current occupant of the twin-bed room. Joanna wondered whether Barker spied on her too.

  At the gate he asked them to stop the car and turned the Vacancies sign to No Vacancies. It seemed at once sad, poignant and a final gesture of defeat. But then he climbed back into the car and seemed settled by the action. He stared straight ahead of him, not even turning to look at his beloved lake as they passed. His mother’s voice was advising him.

  ‘Tell the truth, Horace. You must always tell the truth. And then you won’t burn.’

  Once in the station, Joanna cautioned him and asked him if he wanted a solicitor.

  ‘Not for the moment,’ he said comfortably. ‘I’ll be all right without one – for the present.’

  Unfazed by the caution, the recording and the presence of the two detectives, he settled back in his chair, folded his arms and looked up. ‘Now then,’ he said. ‘What is it you want to know?’

  Well – where to begin?

  ‘Mr Barker,’ she said, ‘back in July two French girls by the names
of Dorothée Caron and Annabelle Bellange stayed at Mandalay, your guest house.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, fidgeting in his chair.

  ‘They haven’t been seen since.’

  ‘I thought you knew where they were. In London, wasn’t it?’

  ‘We’re not convinced that the text message actually did come from Dorothée Caron.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And as you know, we’ve found two rucksacks which we believe belong to them at your guest house.’ She leaned in. Could he not see it? Was he dense? Did he lack any insight? ‘Are you sure you don’t want a solicitor to advise you?’

  ‘It isn’t necessary,’ Barker replied.

  ‘When did you last see the girls?’

  ‘When they left,’ Barker said.

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘On the Sunday morning. Very early. July the twenty-first, I think.’

  ‘And you can confirm that those are their rucksacks?’

  Barker nodded, his eyes now looking worried and tense as though he was catching up with the detectives’ deductions.

  ‘How come the rucksacks are still at Mandalay?’

  ‘They just left them there.’ He was looking at them as though he thought they were the crazy one. ‘They didn’t take them with them.’

  ‘But they couldn’t manage without them.’

  ‘I know that, but all the same they went and their rucksacks didn’t.’

  ‘And you didn’t find it strange or think to let us know?’

  ‘I found it very strange but that is what happened.’

  Joanna gave Mike an incredulous look. Was this guy for real? Apparently not.

  ‘When I went up to clean the room a little later that day – towards evening, actually – and the rucksacks were standing in the middle of the floor, I assumed they’d be coming back for them some time but I had a family due to arrive Sunday evening and the children were going to go in the twin-bed room. I needed it and people don’t like to arrive at a place when the previous occupants’ belongings are still in the room. I moved them initially into my kitchen so I could give the room a thorough clean. I just thought they’d be back for them when they’d finished doing whatever it was that they were up to. But they didn’t come back. They never did. I kept them in the cellar at first, out of the way, then I took them up to the kitchen. I couldn’t work it out. Then those two men came and started asking questions. And then you came around, asking more questions, and the French lady, Annabelle’s mother, so I had to hide them out of the way. Otherwise,’ he said earnestly, ‘you might have been suspicious.’

  Joanna almost snorted her derision, but she had to continue with her line of questioning. ‘Why didn’t you let Madame Bellange know that you had her daughter’s rucksack?’

  ‘I thought it would look bad.’ His logic was unarguable; his common sense completely absent. Suddenly he lost it. He sniggered. ‘And what would you have thought,’ he asked, mocking her. ‘What would you have thought?’

  I would have thought you were stark staring mad.

  Then, quite suddenly, the enormity of his situation must have penetrated. It was as though he drifted in and out of comprehension. He paled, gulped, swallowed and gulped again while his eyes looked frankly terrified then calm then panicky. He pulled on his collar as though it was tightening around his neck. Joanna almost wanted to reassure him that the last hanging in Staffordshire had been a hundred years ago.

  ‘Again I’ll ask you,’ she said. ‘Do you want a lawyer?’

  Barker screwed up his face like a small child and this time he nodded. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The girl – the woman, Miss Bingley, who’s staying there,’ he said. ‘What about her? What’ll happen to her?’

  ‘Your house has been sealed off,’ Joanna said. ‘We’ll be applying for a search warrant. And advise Miss Bingley to find alternative accommodation.’ She couldn’t resist a swift dig at this man who had further blotted her copy book in front of the new chief superintendent. ‘Under the circumstances I’m sure she’ll be happy to oblige. And the other B&Bs in this area are not too busy at this time of year.’

  Barker looked at the floor, seemingly more upset by the inconvenience to his beloved Mandalay than his present predicament.

  The duty solicitor arrived half an hour later and to Joanna’s pleasure it was her old pal, Tom Fairway, now husband of Caro, her London journalist friend and father to Luke Christopher Fairway. She gave Tom a warm smile but he, as ever, was one hundred per cent professional. He gave her a curt, slightly mischievous nod, sat down opposite Barker and introduced himself. Barker’s response was to hold out a pudgy hand and thank the solicitor ‘for his attendance’, at which point Tom shrugged and gave Joanna a swift, puzzled glance.

  Joanna hadn’t seen him for a while. Only twice since her wedding. His hair was thinning and receding. He still wore the same glasses and was as stick thin as ever. But then Caro, a journalist who only recently left London to live in Leek, was probably no great cook.

  Tom looked up at her. ‘Of what is my client accused of?’

  ‘He’s just helping us with our enquiries over the disappearance of two French girls who had been staying at his bed and breakfast in July,’ Joanna said. ‘They haven’t been seen since and we’ve found their rucksacks at his guest house. Tom,’ she added urgently, ‘can I have a word?’

  ‘Sure.’ He followed her outside.

  ‘Mr Barker had a little peephole into the room where the girls were staying,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s possible they found out about it and …’

  ‘And you’re wondering whether this was a motive for a double murder?’ He pushed his heavy glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  Joanna felt stung into defending her theory. ‘People have been killed for less,’ she said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘On September the eleventh the mother of one of the girls received a text message from her daughter’s phone. Dorothée said they were heading for London.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The call originated from this area. Neither girl has been seen since Sunday morning, July twenty-first.’

  ‘How geographically precise can you be about the location from where the text was sent?’

  ‘We can pin it down to Rudyard,’ Joanna said. ‘Not to the guest house.’

  Tom frowned and glanced through the round window in the door at his client, who was sitting motionless now, his eyes terrified, bulging as though he was a rabbit caught in headlights.

  He re-entered the interview room. ‘Right,’ he said, opening up his briefcase and taking out a few sheets of paper and a biro. ‘I need a bit of time alone with Mr Barker.’

  Warrant in hand, Mark Fask, civilian ex-scene of crimes officer, had been summoned into Mandalay and, with his team, was making a thorough search of the place, looking for anything that might incriminate Barker or involve him further in the girls’ disappearance.

  ‘What more do you need, Fask?’ he muttered and knew. Evidence of the crime.

  He went from room to room testing for bloodstains and collecting hair samples. But the trouble was that many people had stayed in Mandalay since July and Barker was very thorough in his cleaning. It was possible that even if a crime had been committed here there would be little or no trace evidence. He wasn’t over-hopeful.

  Then he came to the twin-bed room and the Tretchikoff. He stood in front of it, his face twisting as he tried to remember where he had seen it before. Then he remembered. His grandmother had had this very print hanging over the fireplace in her lounge. Like millions of others, he suspected. It had been a very popular print in the avant-garde sixties. He stood back, hands on expanded hips, and stared. Well, who would have thought it? Here it was again and, according to his brief, Miss Wong had her beady eye on things – just like his Grandma. He put his eye to the hole but saw nothing from this side.

  The adjacent room was the small box room where the rucksacks h
ad been found. Windowless, dark, airless, claustrophobic. And the light that shone through the hole in the Chinese girl’s eye almost made a camera obscura in the room. Just beneath the hole Fask noted a wooden box, probably put there for Barker to stand on and line his eye up.

  It was later in the afternoon when he opened up the khaki rucksack that he found something really significant, held it in his hand and dialled the station on his own phone.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said when he was connected, ‘we’ve found a mobile phone.’

  SIXTEEN

  Fask slipped the mobile phone into an evidence bag and started to charge it up, then scrolled down until he reached: Mon numéro.

  He made a note of it then again checked with the station to find out the number of Dorothée’s phone – the one that had texted her mother. It was the same one. He looked at the message history and there it was. Maman. Words and all: just over three weeks ago. It didn’t exactly take Einstein’s brain to know that things looked very black indeed for Mr Barker.

  He rang the station and spoke to Korpanski. Gave him the details. ‘I’ll bring it back and we can check through other stuff – photos and the rest of the call record. I’ve found Annabelle’s phone too, but the battery is taking longer to charge.’

  Mike was quiet. Then he said, ‘But there’s no sign of the girls?’

  ‘I’ve found nothing, so far, Mike. No signs of a struggle. No positive bloodstains. Nothing unusual. It’s as though they just vanished into thin air.’

  It wasn’t quite what Korpanski wanted to hear, but still. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘cheers.’

  He related the contents of the calls to Joanna, who looked serious and thoughtful. Then she picked up the phone and dialled Fask’s number herself. ‘The rucksacks,’ she asked. ‘Were they neatly packed inside?’

  Fask wasn’t sure where this was leading but he answered, ‘Yep. Everything folded up just so.’

  ‘Both rucksacks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about money?’