by Alice Castle
Beth was puzzled, though. ‘A reception? That’d be adults only, not teenage girls…’
‘They get the local teenagers to act as waiting staff. The older kids take the drinks round, the younger ones organise the coats and so on… The CCTV footage is grainy, but there are a number of kids around who could be our girl… I need to sit down and pore over it, but there’s too much going on at the moment and I’m so short staffed.’
‘I don’t suppose I could?’ Beth began hopefully.
‘Are you crazy?’ York’s eyebrows disappeared into his thatch of hair at the very idea. ‘It’s bad enough sitting here telling you anything. Getting you involved in the enquiry would be madness.’
‘It’s such a pity. I’ve got the time – well, I haven’t, technically, I’ve got a hundred things to do at work, but somehow I don’t seem to be there – and I’d love to help. But it’s your call.’
‘The thing that would really help me would be if you could go through everything you saw this morning. There could be something, anything, that could make a difference.’
Beth sat and pondered. There was something eating away at the back of her mind. Something she’d seen while she’d been sitting here – something amongst the standard sights and sounds of a Dulwich afternoon – which had jogged a faint but important memory. What was it? For the life of her, she couldn’t quite remember. It was as though a favourite jumper she’d been searching everywhere for was dangling, just out of sight, at the back of her mental wardrobe. It was maddening.
She rested an elbow on the arm of the bench, and pressed her fingers to her temple, willing the thought to surface again. She remembered having taught Ben how to hold his breath under water, years ago, and then having to watch anxiously as he spent the afternoon disappearing for longer and longer moments under the choppy turquoise waters of the swimming baths at Forest Hill. Now, she was holding her own breath, as the memory stubbornly stayed submerged and threatened to drown itself in the useless trivia of her subconscious. Beth cursed herself for knowing where their library tickets were, for remembering the dates of the key Napoleonic battles, not to mention the names of most of Thomas the Tank Engine’s colleagues, and for even having tried to follow the plot of An Unfortunate Series of Events. If she’d had less rubbish crammed in her one poor head, she might have been able to delve into a mind as tidy as a freshly-sorted filing cabinet and fish out this one, elusive fact, which turned out to be all she really needed anyway. She groaned. York turned to her in concern.
‘Look, I’m not going to say don’t fret, because that’s all we can do for her at the moment. But you did everything you should have done. We got her to the hospital as quickly as we could, and everything that can possibly be done is happening right now,’ he said kindly.
Beth took her hand away from her face, touched at his worry. She was concerned about the poor girl, but she had faith in the NHS. During the two great medical crises of her life – Ben’s birth, and her husband James’s terrible death – it had been magnificent. ‘Thanks, but it’s not that. There’s something I’ve just remembered I’ve forgotten, if you see what I mean. Something that could be really important… And it’s just gone. Does that make sense?’
‘’Course. Happens to me all the time. Just be patient. It’ll come back when you least expect it.’
‘Well, that’s all well and good, but I really think we need it now. If Sophia could be dying… that makes it all the more urgent. And whatever it is that’s nagging away at me… well, I feel it might give us a lead. We don’t have a lot, do we?’
A wince from York reminded Beth not to say ‘we’ too much. As far as he would be concerned, there wasn’t any ‘we’. He was police; she wasn’t. All right, he’d blurred the boundaries by telling her the little he had. But she’d do well not to remind him of that. It was better to concentrate on trying to coax this bit of information out of her unhelpful head. Maybe it was nothing, but she had the feeling that it was something.
‘So, it’s just occurred to you again now, but you actually first thought of it earlier today?’ York asked.
Beth nodded.
‘To do with the girl, I’m guessing. So, was it those photos you were looking at? Facebook, Instagram? Something in the background, maybe a person, a place?’ He scanned Beth’s face as he spoke. She thought hard, but there was no spark of recognition. The trail seemed cold. He shrugged and turned back to the gardens in front of them, leading up to the austere planes and angles of the Picture Gallery. ‘Something to do with the Gallery itself? One of the pictures there reminded you of something, someone you’ve seen, the girl, maybe?’
This seemed a bit more promising. Beth considered for a moment, flipping through her personal database of the Gallery’s pictures in her mind’s eye. She’d visited so many times, she knew the pictures almost by heart. Did Sophia, or one of her friends, perhaps remind her of one of Gainsborough’s beautiful Linley sisters, for example? Beth loved this picture. It was another sweeping, full-length portrait, like the one of sad Mrs Moody. This time, it featured sisters Mary and Elizabeth Linley, at the peak of their youth and beauty. Beth loved the story behind the picture almost as much as the canvas itself.
Elizabeth Linley, in blue, was painted with a saintly look in her eye. In real life, she was anything but. First, she broke off a promising engagement after a fling with a family friend, then she electrified society by bolting to France with the playwright Sheridan. Two duels were fought over her hand. Appropriately enough, Sheridan was the author of the smash hit of the times, School for Scandal, and the escapade gained her the kind of international notoriety, across Irish, English and Parisian circles, that a girl like Sophia Jones-Creedy could only dream of.
Beth felt disloyal to the Linley sisters, as she’d always loved their portrait, but had to admit that Sophia had the edge when it came to beauty. She could understand why Elizabeth might want to look a little aloof, given her all-action private life, but to today’s tastes she appeared a tad frosty. Her sister, Mary, had drawn the short straw on the dress front, getting the drab brown gown instead of Elizabeth’s shimmering blue silk, but her bold gaze invited the viewer to draw closer, sit down, and listen to the beautiful singing she and her sister were famed for. There was sheet music open on her lap, and it wasn’t a stretch to imagine her bursting into a heavenly aria.
The Linleys were definitely the ‘It’ girls of the 1780s, and if Beth had been reminded of anyone in the Gallery, it would have been them. But that wasn’t it. She shook her head. ‘I just can’t think. It’s driving me mad.’
‘You were here on the bench when you suddenly thought of it again. Is it to do with where we’re sitting, something you can see from here?’
Beth sat up a little straighter, and shot a look at York. He was good at this memory game – presumably because he spent so much time trying to jog the reluctant recollections of various hair-raising criminals. Though she doubted he’d coax them quite so kindly. She tried to concentrate. She could feel the warmth of the sun still on the back of her neck, hear the familiar sounds of Dulwich snacking and chatting, see the Gallery in front of her… It was all a lot nicer than being locked in an interview room, facing hostile questioning, but she felt almost as much under stress. This was so important, and she just wasn’t getting anywhere. It was so frustrating.
She shook her head from one side and the other, about to declare she’d drawn a blank on all fronts, when the laurel bush at her side caught her eye. Peeping out here and there from the mass of glossy, racing-green leaves were those startling berries, as red as the drop of blood from Sleeping Beauty’s finger when the spindle did its worst. It was the colour she remembered. With a shiver, she was back in the mausoleum, only that morning, though it already seemed like days ago, catching her first sight of the prone form. But what had she glimpsed just before that horror?
‘The backpack! The red backpack. Where did it go?’
‘What backpack?’ said York. It was his turn to sit up a
little straighter. Piercing blue eyes met intelligent grey ones. Beth’s gaze widened and out came a torrent of words. ‘It was bright scarlet, it had long straps, it was lying there by the bench in the mausoleum. It was what I saw first. Sophia was out of sight from anyone just passing by from the main gallery. You had to go right into the mausoleum itself to see her. And the reason I went in was because of that bag – the colour, you know. It reminded me of… last time.’
York could sense her revulsion as she remembered what they’d both seen that spring. The last thing he needed now was for her to go off-track. He put a warm hand on her arm. ‘Concentrate on this morning,’ he urged, not realising that the grip of his fingers was now distracting her almost as much as the bad memories. She shook her head a little.
‘Tricia was there, she was frozen, I rang you… we stayed until the paramedics got there, they shifted Sophia out… I don’t know what happened to the bag, I don’t know! I just wasn’t thinking about it; I was only hoping she wouldn’t die…’
‘Look, don’t worry. It’s not your job to keep track of everything at the scene, for goodness’ sake. What usually happens is all the belongings go to the hospital with the patient. I bet it just got swept up with her and shoved into the ambulance – simple as that. I’ll quickly ask at the front desk here, in case it did get left behind, then we’ll go to the hospital and find it.’
‘We?’ Beth was struck again by the pronoun.
‘Well yes, if you don’t mind. After all, you saw it – you can identify it. We wouldn’t want to make a mistake over what could turn out to be our only clue.’ With that, York was off the bench and striding away.
Beth hurried to follow, then remembered. Ben! She couldn’t just take off like this, tempting though it was to keep York believing she was free to help him out with the investigation. She had responsibilities. Her heart sank a little, and then she chastised herself. She should never see Ben as a burden. Hard though it was being a single parent, it was also the most enormous privilege – and she loved it. She felt a backwash of guilt, but also a devout wish that she could be in two places at once. It wasn’t even as though Ben would want her to come and drag him away from Charlie’s. There was nothing for it, though. She’d ring Katie and arrange to pick him up and just go home.
‘I need to make a call,’ she said, to York’s rapidly retreating back. He raised one hand in acknowledgement and strode on. How lovely to be that unencumbered, that determined, able to do whatever you felt was right, she thought fleetingly as she dialled. ‘Katie? It’s me,’ she said.
Five minutes later, Beth caught York up as he was leaning over the ticket desk and charming Tricia’s replacement. Although it was hardly appropriate, she had the bubbly feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and realise it’s a Saturday, not the drab weekday-workday you were expecting. Katie had let her off the hook completely.
The three boys were immersed in some sub-Game of Thrones-style cyberworld, busily collecting coins and wands and slaying dragons left right and centre. Katie said Matteo had picked the game up incredibly fast. Charlie had even been nursed through his piano practice and two pages of tutoring, while Ben and Matteo – apparently – had diligently studied the spellings for their usual test on Friday. Beth found it hard to believe of Ben, though she was intrigued that her son seemed to be developing great acting skills. Every week she struggled to get him to go over the spellings, and every week he told her he knew them already, despite plenty of red-penned evidence to the contrary when the book was marked. Maybe this Matteo boy was a good influence? Maybe three heads were better than one? Well, if so, Beth was thrilled and ready to put her qualms about the interloper to rest.
The upshot was that Katie, hearing that York wanted Beth to help him with his enquiries, suddenly became extremely keen for Ben to stay the night. Maybe it was because she didn’t have the heart to interrupt their game. Maybe her matchmaking antennae were twitching like a dog scenting sausages. She wasn’t letting on. Matteo only lived round the corner and was being picked up by his mother, but Katie said she would drop Ben at school in the morning. Then she and Beth would try and meet for a debrief coffee if they had time – at Jane’s, the price she was exacting for the not very arduous task of keeping Charlie happy all evening by having his friends round. Both women finished the call wreathed with smiles – though Beth immediately tried to tamp hers down a little. After all, her prize was to go off to hospital to see a girl suspended between this world and the next. It was hardly a jolly.
But, Beth realised, a part of her would always be like this, relishing the challenge of the puzzle and the chance to slot some pieces into place, so much that it was a struggle to remember the human dimension – the girl. Though it sounded as if she was now so far adrift from the world that she wasn’t far from floating free. Beth thought about the girl’s unknowing family, so far apparently oblivious to the crisis. Beth didn’t have to try too hard to imagine the pain they’d feel. She just had to picture Ben, for one second, in the same situation. She shook her head fiercely. Unbearable.
York, cocking his head towards her, having drawn a blank on the backpack as far as the Gallery was concerned, led the way quickly to his car. It was plonked right outside the gates, in flagrant disregard of all the Dulwich parking by-laws. Beth stood and gawped. ‘It must be so great, never having to worry about getting a ticket,’ she said, sounding rather awed by his job for the first time.
York chuckled. ‘Usually it’s the idea of racing round at top speed with the siren and lights that takes people’s fancy. In a place like this, it’s the parking perks that impress people.’ Beth slanted a glance up at him through her fringe, and smiled.
‘Did you ever think about joining the police?’ he asked her.
‘It didn’t cross my mind. The idea of chasing villains – I’m not sure I’m built for it.’
York gave her a sidelong look. ‘You can run, can’t you?’
‘Well, yes, if I have to. But aren’t there, erm, height requirements?’ said Beth, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. It was as clear a signal as a big red neon sign hovering over her diminutive head, shouting ‘five feet nothing!’
‘No height restrictions at all in the Met, and they’ve gone in all the other forces, too. In fact, it’s now a bit of a thing to be the smallest police officer in the country. There’s a PC in Wiltshire who’s about 4ft 10, I think.’
Beth snorted.
‘No, really,’ insisted York. ‘Every year they have a picture of the tallest and shortest officers in the press – sort of little and large.’
‘I don’t know, I’d be a bit worried about some huge villain just picking me up and carrying me off,’ said Beth.
York smiled at the image, but said confidently, ‘Oh, stick you in a stab jacket, give you a taser and a Glock, and I think you’d acquit yourself ok.’
‘You don’t have a gun, do you?’ Beth said in alarm, shrinking away slightly in the confines of the car.
‘Not on me,’ said York. It was funny, firearms in the UK were still a source of fascinated revulsion for the public. Though people were more used to seeing armed officers in airports and at the main stations, where automatic weapons were the norm, there was still great faith in the Dixon of Dock Green school of policing, where a village bobby kept perfect order simply by finding stray cats and saying, ‘Evening all.’ If only the world were still that simple.
York set off down Wyatt Road into the village. The rush hour was by now in full swing. Though most of the mummies had already been out and back to pick up their charges, there was a second wave of massive 4x4 cars on the streets as after-school activities finished. Some lucky children were now going home; others were being ferried to yet more improving appointments. York, stuck behind a massive Lexus SUV with tinted windows that would not have looked out of place getting a rapper from gig to gig in downtown LA, was beginning to lose patience. When a Volvo the size and shape of a cruise ship cut in front of him at the intersection with Calton
Avenue, he’d had enough. Reaching over to Beth’s side, he scrabbled in the glove compartment with his left hand, plucked out a domed plastic light, flicked the switch, opened the window, and jammed the magnetic device onto the roof. At the same time, an unearthly wailing sound started up and he yanked the steering wheel to the right. For a second, Beth thought they were giving way to a police car behind them – then she realised. They were the police car, giving way to nobody. They were, in fact, now sailing past the rest of the traffic, while the mummies scurried to turn their huge vehicles into the left side of the road and leave a clear path for them.
‘Is this legal?’ said Beth, raising her eyebrows and clutching the side of the car door with a nervous hand.
‘Of course, it is. We’re in a hurry. That girl is dying, and we need to get there before it’s too late,’ said York.
Beth couldn’t argue with that. She hunkered down in her seat, surreptitiously checking that her seat belt was a) fastened and b) sufficiently sturdy. Then she stared straight ahead, trying not to see the red lights and Give Way signs that loomed in front of her, only to be swerved around or simply ignored. After five minutes, she decided it was probably best to squeeze her eyes closed.
Just when she was about to ask if she could get out and walk and meet him there later, they came to an abrupt halt and the siren was turned off in mid-wail. Once the sound was no longer there, filling her head, Beth realised how loud it had been, and how much energy she’d been expending in blocking it from her hearing. She opened her eyes, gingerly, and found that they were parked right outside the hospital, and that York was looking at her, the usual amused smile in his eyes.