by Ford, P. F.
‘I’ll ask her on the way out. Thanks for these.’ He waved the photos in the air before putting them carefully in his pocket.
She led him to the door and shook his hand warmly as he left.
‘If there’s anything else I can do, or if you have any more questions, just let me know,’ she said.
Just as Camilla had predicted, Amber seemed to be totally overwhelmed by, and engrossed in, her work. Slater figured that maybe it would be better to meet her in a different environment, and she agreed to meet him outside, after work at five o’clock.
He had half an hour to kill, so he sauntered across to investigate a small park which nestled behind the buildings opposite. He took a quick look around. This really was a nice little park. It would be a good place to have a quiet chat with Amber. There was even a coffee shop just two doors down from The Magazine. He could meet Amber, buy them coffees, and then bring her across to the park. Perfect.
He ambled slowly back to the offices and sat on a bench nearby to wait, slowly becoming lost in his thoughts about the case. There was no doubt it was getting more complicated by the minute, and his instincts were telling him he was beginning to open up a whole can of worms – and who knew where that was going to lead?
No matter what Ruth’s sister might believe, it seemed there was no doubt Ruth had been leading a double life. She was the dowdy, forgiveness-seeking prayer-monger at the weekend, but the sassy, sexy, complete opposite during the week. So what, he wondered, had she really been up to?
The possibilities this double identity offered made him feel uneasy. In his experience, people who led such lives rarely did so from good intentions. Whatever was really behind Ruth’s behaviour and disappearance, he had the uncomfortable feeling it was going to be a whole lot more complicated than a simple runaway.
He was roused from his thoughts by a tap on the shoulder.
‘Amber! I’m sorry. I meant to come and stand by the door.’
‘That’s ok,’ she said, shyly. ‘You weren’t exactly hard to find.’
He jumped to his feet.
‘Come on, I’ll buy you a coffee. We can talk in the park over the road, if that’s ok?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, falling into step alongside him. ‘Great.’
She insisted on waiting outside while Slater queued for two coffees. She was wearing a light waterproof coat which hung open to reveal a short blue skirt and a sensible white blouse. Watching her through the window, he could see her fidgeting and fiddling with her skirt under the coat. It was a good six inches above her knees to start, but as he watched, it seemed to lengthen until it stopped just above her knees.
Observing her, he thought she was a bit on the skinny side, and she obviously lacked a bit of confidence which made her stand small rather than tall. He thought about the photos he had seen of her with Ruth, and how happy and confident she had looked then. He guessed Ruth had given her that confidence. Camilla had said Ruth had that ability to make people feel good.
‘Amber. It’s a pretty name,’ he said, as they walked slowly over to the little park.
‘My mum chose it. As soon as she saw what colour me hair was,’ she explained.
‘It was a good choice. Do you get on with your mum?’
‘Oh, yeah. She’s great. It’s me dad who’s hard work.’
‘He doesn’t like the short skirt, then?’
She looked embarrassed.
‘I watched it growing longer while I was waiting for the coffees,’ Slater explained.
‘He says it makes me look like a tart,’ Amber said. ‘He seems to think fashion’s a crime. He’d wrap me up in cotton wool if he had his way. He never lets me go out with boys or anything.’
Slater thought that would explain her lack of confidence.
He led her to a bench and invited her to sit with him.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind talking to me?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she began. ‘But I’m not sure I really understand why you’re asking questions. I mean, I told ‘em what I knew before. They said she ran away. She did, didn’t she? That’s what the other policemen said back then.’
‘I understand,’ Slater said. ‘And I know you spoke to them before, but sometimes you remember things after the event, you know? We just want to make sure we got it right and didn’t miss anything back then. You’re not in any trouble or anything like that. Okay?’
She nodded her head and smiled. He smiled back. Slater got the impression that Amber wasn’t used to being listened to, and was enjoying being the focus of someone’s undivided attention. ‘Did you like Ruth?’ he began.
‘Oh, yeah. She was like the big sister I never had, you know? She was funny and kind. I’d never met anyone like her before. At first, she just showed me how to do my job. She taught me what to say to people, how to answer the phone in the right way...’
She had a smile on her face just from the memory. Slater thought Ruth had meant a lot to this slip of a girl.
‘And then she started to help me with my clothes, and my make-up. She was really good to me, you know? She was a fun person. Just being with her made me feel so good.’
She looked into his face for the first time, and he could see the tears in her eyes.
‘And then she just left. She didn’t even tell me she was going. Just didn’t turn up no more.’
The tears were flowing now. Slater fumbled in his pocket for a tissue and handed it to her. She wiped her eyes and sniffed hard.
‘Sorry,’ she said, quietly.
‘Don’t apologise,’ Slater said, gently. ‘You really miss her don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘I really do. There’s not much fun in my life right now.’
‘I think you were probably a little bit in love with her,’ he explained, adding hastily when he saw the look on her face, ‘like you’d love a big sister. So it’s quite natural to be upset when you think about how much you miss her.’
‘Yeah. I suppose so. But I can’t understand why she didn’t say goodbye. I mean, it’s not as if I could have told anyone where she’d gone or anything.’
This was a blow. He’d been hoping Amber would be able to fill in the blanks regarding her life up here in town.
‘You can keep a secret, then?’
‘I didn’t have to.’ She looked at him. ‘She never actually told me anything. I’ve spent hours thinking about it since she left. It wasn’t until she’d gone that I realised she had never told me anything about herself. I knew she went home every weekend, but I can’t remember her ever telling me where home was. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Did she ever talk about her sister?’
‘Not really, no. She did say she was a bit bossy and interfering, but that was something of a one-off, you know? She never really talked about her family or her home.’
Slater was getting the feeling this interview was going to be a fruitless exercise. It seemed as though Amber, the nearest thing to a friend Ruth had seemed to have, knew even less about her than he did. Maybe he needed to change his approach.
He spent another 15 minutes trying to get Amber to remember any little detail that might help, but he quickly realised he was wasting his time. And it wasn’t that Amber was keeping things from him; he was convinced she genuinely didn’t know anything. The only slight glimmer of hope was that Amber thought Ruth may once have mentioned staying with a cousin in a flat in Clapham. But even that wasn’t backed up with any degree of certainty.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I’m really not helping much am I? I’m just a waste of your time.’
‘It’s ok,’ he reassured her, ‘You can’t tell me what you don’t know. I’m grateful you could spare me the time. And anyway, you’ve told me a bit more about what sort of person she was. And that helps, honestly.’
He gave her a smile of encouragement and she smiled shyly back. He thought she was quite pretty when she smiled and he could imagine how someone like Ruth would have been so good for this girl’s
confidence.
‘Anyway,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘I’d better let you get off home.’
‘Oh that’s alright. There’s no rush,’ she said, a bit too hastily. ‘Me mum’s a nurse. She’s working late. And I’m in no hurry to face me dad. He’ll want to know where I’ve been, who I’ve been with.’
She didn’t say any more about her dad, but Slater could imagine what she meant.
‘We can talk some more if you like,’ she said, hopefully. ‘It’s nice talking to you. You don’t try to make me feel small, you know? And you listen to what I say, just like Ruth did.’
This conversation was taking a turn Slater hadn’t bargained on. She was a nice enough kid, but the last thing Slater needed now was a girl half his age developing a crush on him. It wasn’t the first time he had inadvertently attracted the attentions of the opposite sex, and to be honest, he quite enjoyed the game when it involved the right sort of woman, but Amber didn’t meet his criteria at all.
‘I’m afraid I have to catch a train,’ he explained. ‘And you need to get yourself home, even if your dad is the only person waiting for you.’
‘But at least tonight I can tell him I’ve been helping the police,’ she said gloomily. ‘He can’t find fault with that, can he?’
‘I certainly hope not,’ agreed Slater. ‘But if he does, give him this.’ He handed her one of his cards. ‘Tell him he can call me any time if he wants to know why I’m talking to you.’
She looked at the card as if it were something really precious. Then she looked up at him and back to the card.
‘Can I keep it?’
‘Of course.’
‘Really? Wow!’ she said breathlessly, clutching the card to her heart. ‘You’re the first man who’s ever given me his phone number.’
Now Slater was becoming just a tad alarmed. This was supposed to be an interview, but Amber was beginning to treat it like a first date.
‘It’s just a business card, Amber. In case you think of anything else that might help me. It’s quite possible you’ll think of something in the next day or two. It often happens like that, and if it does, I’d like you to give me a ring. Do you understand?’
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, unconvincingly. ‘I get it. If I think of anything else, I’ll ring. And I will, I promise.’
He walked with her, down to the tube station where, at last, they said their farewells; Slater trying to be as professionally formal as possible, but with the overwhelming feeling that Amber was expecting something more, like perhaps a hug or even a kiss goodbye.
As the train gathered speed on the way back to Tinton, Slater asked himself what more he had learnt today. Not much, if he was being honest. But it wasn’t all bad news. At least now, on the plus side, he knew Ruth was definitely leading some sort of double life, and during the week it was based up in London. But that was where the pluses ended. So far, he didn’t have a clue where exactly the London part of her double life was based.
It seemed The Mistral hotel almost certainly didn’t exist.
There was a possible cousin, but this seemed unlikely too. Surely her sister would have known that and told him about it. And there might be a flat in Clapham, but even that was only a vague possibility.
The only thing he could really be sure about was that finding where she lived was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A bloody huge haystack.
But the thing that was nagging away at him more than anything was this: it hadn’t taken any great detective work to find out what he now knew; the information had been there at The Magazine the whole time. All anyone had to do was ask. So why was there no mention of most of it in the original investigation?
Chapter Seven
The previous inquiry had supposedly done all the possible searches to find something to prove Ruth Thornhill had lived in London, and it claimed it had drawn a blank. Nevertheless, Dave Slater went painstakingly through the procedures again.
First, he tried to find some reference to her as an individual. But this drew the very same blank as it had for those before him. There appeared to be no record of her anywhere. He thought that was bizarre in itself and should have warranted a mention in the original report, but he wasn’t really surprised that it hadn’t.
Next, he tried looking for The Mistral hotel. Camilla Heywood said she had never heard of it. He had had no reason to disbelieve her, but now Dave Slater knew for sure that she was telling the truth. There was no hotel by the name of The Mistral in London. Unless, of course, it did exist but was so exclusive no one knew where it was.
Yeah, he thought in frustration. Right.
He had spent the entire morning searching everywhere he could think of, but the place just didn’t exist. He felt the needle he was seeking had just got a lot smaller – and the haystack a damned sight bigger. If only he knew what he was looking for. Was it a hotel, or a flat, or what?
A phone call to Beverley Green earlier in the day had revealed no knowledge of a cousin or any other sort of relative living in London, but he had taken this news with a large pinch of salt. After his visit to The Magazine yesterday, Slater wasn’t sure what to think of the story Beverley had originally told him.
He knew he was going to have to tell her what he’d found out eventually, but that was a problem that could wait until he was sure what the facts really were. Right now, he was beginning to think the only thing he was really sure of was that he wasn’t really sure of anything.
He had been hoping a two-hour lunchtime walk around town would clear his head and enable him to think more clearly, but it had failed to work. Now it was mid-afternoon and he had been sitting gazing at a large map of Clapham for the past half hour.
He had focused in on the Clapham area because Amber had said Ruth might have mentioned a cousin in Clapham. Admittedly, Beverley had already told him there was no cousin anywhere in London, but with nothing else to go on, he was clinging rather desperately to the hope that something might jump out at him.
And then, finally, just as he was about to give up, he spotted something. In amongst the jumble of streets, almost too small to spot, he saw the word Mistral. It wasn’t The Mistral hotel. It wasn’t even Mistral Street. It was called Mistral Court and it was small enough to easily miss. It appeared to be a small side-street, or perhaps a courtyard, that couldn’t have contained more than a handful of houses.
He went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of tea, then returned once more to the map. He studied it again. Now he’d found Mistral Court he couldn’t keep his eyes away from it. A part of him was saying this was likely to be another waste of time. But another part was reminding him that his hunches had paid off before, and they’d never let him down. So why should this one be any different?
And anyway, what else did he have to go on?
Chapter Eight
It was 10.30 am on a warm sunny May morning when Dave Slater emerged from Clapham Common tube station. He didn’t really need to consult the notes he’d made on a scrappy piece of paper but he did it anyway. Then, having got his bearings, he headed up a bustling Clapham High Street. Being part of the main A3 into London from Surrey, it was thick with the noise of traffic on his right side, and the occasional blare of music from shops on his left.
As he walked he swung his gaze from side to side, checking every building name and number for anything that might relate to ‘The Mistral’, but nothing caught his attention. He counted the turnings on the left. He passed one, two, three. Now he could see the turning he was looking for up ahead. As he rounded the corner, he stopped to make sure. Yes. Clapham Manor Street. This was it. Fourth on the left, off Clapham High Street. Mistral Court should be down here on the left. Sure enough, after about 100 yards he found it.
He had expected to find a small street, or perhaps some sort of open courtyard, and maybe back in the past that was what it had been. But now he was confronted by high walls, a gated entrance, and a keypad. There was nothing else, not even a list of flat numbers or
residents. Presumably, if you didn’t know the code to get in you just weren’t welcome.
He could see beyond the gates, and sure enough, there was a courtyard surrounded by small terraced houses that were probably once pretty shabby. But whatever this place might have been in the past, it was obvious it was now a rather exclusive complex of luxury homes. He didn’t really have a clue about property values up here, but he knew enough to know he was looking at megabucks. Even if she had been renting and not buying, this place would have been beyond the means of a part-time receptionist, that’s for sure.
Cursing quietly to himself, Slater wondered what he should do next. Maybe this particular hunch was going to be the one that let him down. He supposed it was bound to happen sooner or later. But it would be a great pity if he’d had to come all the way up here to find out.
He decided that now he was here he might as well have a wander up and down the road. You never know, he might find something. But although he walked the full length of Clapham Manor Street and back again, he couldn’t find a single thing that might help.
He was disappointed but, he conceded, it had always been a long shot. He stuffed his hands disconsolately into his jacket pockets as he walked slowly back towards Clapham High Street. In his left pocket, he felt the sharp corners of the two photos of Ruth.
There was just one, small, positive thing he could think of: at least he wouldn’t have to catch a rush hour train back to Tinton, so he might even get a seat this time.
At the junction where Manor Street met the High Street, there was a corner shop selling newspapers, cigarettes, etc. He decided he might as well buy a newspaper to read on the train. As he waited to be served, he wondered how many people from Manor Street must pass through this shop every day. Probably loads, he thought. Even those from Mistral Court might well call in here if they were on foot…