by Simon Mason
The first sign was a faint noise at the edge of the silence, unreal. Gradually it became real. A low hum, a buzzing.
There was a screen of alder ahead of him. Cautiously he went towards it. The buzzing grew louder. Through the shadows he saw movement. Innumerable flies seething in a cloud, settling in clumps on a darker shape humped in the undergrowth. Fat shiny bluebottles in a swarm. Garvie put his hand over his mouth and went closer, slowly, moving among the flies that rose around him, stepping through the thicket towards the spot, and found at last, lying there on the ground, legs splayed out, head twisted back, the body of the Dobermann.
He found a clearing nearby, a grass patch surrounded by birch trees narrowing at one end into a broad mud track for vehicles, and walked round it until he found a convenient stump, and sat on it, thinking. It was bright there after the damp darkness of the trees and he lifted his face to the sun and breathed the warm air.
The dead dog was called Rex: its name was on a medallion attached to its collar. It was big animal, heavy-looking; its body had already begun to swell in the heat. Its head was twisted at an angle from its shoulders as if wrenched round violently, and its lips were curled back from its powerful jaws in a fixed snarl.
For a while Garvie thought about the dog. It was a monster, like Smudge had said. Then he thought about the sort of a person who might kill such a dog.
At last he got up and began to make his way through the wood to the path.
Singh was walking briskly along the path from Sophie’s house towards ‘Four Winds’. The wood stood tall around him, beech trees in full leaf, blocking out the sun. As he went, he called the station and arranged for a member of the tech team to pick up Sophie’s phone. He also put through a call to a local volunteer group to organize a sweep of the woods. He looked at his watch again. He had to return to the Police Centre as soon as possible to deliver his preliminary report.
He was anxious. He knew now that, for reasons still unknown, Amy had set off in the storm for Sophie’s house. She hadn’t got there. Increasingly he feared she had been in some sort of danger. He peered into the crowded trees at the side of the path, and his heart sank, thinking of them heaving in the rain and wind.
He walked on. The path bent down over a shallow stream and rose again. Dusty shafts of sunlight filtered through the leaf canopy and dissolved in the shadows. He looked at his watch and increased his pace as the path rose up the hill. At the top of the crest it flattened and broadened, the trees shrank back, and he emerged into sunlight with the pasture on one side of him. Ahead of him he saw the gables of ‘Four Winds’, and he accelerated again. He walked on for another hundred metres or so, and then a boy stepped out of the bushes just ahead of him and stood in the lane wiping his hands.
Singh came to a stop. ‘Garvie! What are you doing here?’
The boy turned and frowned. ‘Just taking a break.’
‘Isn’t this a long way from the house?’
‘Compared to what?’
The boy stared expressionlessly at Singh with those unblinking blue eyes, and Singh felt again his strangeness.
Garvie said, ‘Been talking to one of her friends?’
‘Yes, Sophie Brighouse. How do you know?’
‘Where else would she be headed at midnight in the middle of a storm?’
‘OK, but—’
‘But she didn’t get there.’
Singh paused. ‘No, she didn’t. How do you—’
Garvie parted the branches at the side of the path. ‘Something in here you need to see.’ He glanced back at him.
‘What?’ Singh said.
Garvie said, ‘Hope you’re not bothered by flies.’
‘Flies?’
But Garvie had turned away, and Singh followed him into the trees.
9
An hour later, downtown in the Police Centre, Singh handed his preliminary report to the chief.
The chief was a narrow man with a narrow expression and a thin-lipped mouth that looked as if it didn’t get much use, and he sat behind the gleaming, bare desk in his office, listening impassively.
When Singh had finished, he thought for a moment before speaking.
‘She left the house voluntarily?’
‘It seems so.’
‘Then the likeliest outcome is that she will return as soon as she’s calmed down.’
‘But her behaviour—’
‘Is entirely consistent with a certain sort of teenager. Acting on impulse. Heightening the drama.’
‘But the dog—’
‘Has no bearing on the case until we establish that she took it with her. We don’t even know the cause of its death yet.’ He fixed Singh with his gaze. ‘Have you ascertained the whereabouts of the girl’s father?’
‘No, sir, not yet. He’s on sabbatical and his university doesn’t know where he is. He’s an eccentric, apparently. They think he’s flown to California to stay with someone working in the same field. I’ve been making enquiries there.’
‘And the hotels?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
The chief continued to look at him.
‘Sir,’ Singh added, ‘I have a feeling that we need to make progress very quickly.’
‘Is there evidence that a crime has been committed?’
‘No definite evidence.’
‘Then there can be no justification for extra resources. We’re stretched thin as it is, with Bob’s investigation into the Imperium, and now the murder during the riot in Market Square.’ He paused. ‘But keep me informed. As it happens, I know Elena Roecastle slightly. She needs to be carefully managed until her daughter returns.’
He made a minimal gesture and Singh took his leave.
At the far side of the open-plan area there was a coffee machine and television, and Singh paused to watch it.
On the over-bright screen a policeman was being interviewed about the riot in Market Square the night before. His name appeared in unnecessarily colourful lettering alongside his shimmering head: Detective Inspector Bob Dowell. He was a bald man with a wide face generously spread around a squashed nose, crumpled mouth and small, watchful eyes, like an ex-boxer, which in fact he was; and on his left arm, in the manner of a man bravely casual about such things, he was wearing a sling.
In answer to the interviewer, he described what had happened. An illegal rave in a disused warehouse at the end of The Wicker had got out of hand. Early in the evening fighting broke out inside, and at ten o’clock the police were called in. Panic-stricken people streamed out of the building across the canal and railway tracks into Market Square, where Inspector Dowell, off-duty, was relaxing in a bar. There were running battles between rival groups of partygoers throwing stones and bottles, and the police, mounted and armed with night sticks. Shots were fired.
Dowell said modestly that he had done no more than any officer in his position would have done: directed his colleagues, assisted the wounded and, finally, helped to bring the situation under control. In the course of these efforts, he had been hit in the arm by a stray bullet. But, as he reminded viewers, another man – named as Joel Watkins from Tick Hill, a dispatch rider – had been killed. It was not yet known what he had been doing in the square. Uncorroborated witness statements, as contradictory as usual, put him variously fighting the police, fleeing the fighting, sitting quietly at a café with a man wearing a beanie with the HEAT logo on it, and lying drunk in the gutter.
The investigation into his death, presumed accidental, had been placed under Inspector Dowell’s direction, and he would be tireless in his efforts to bring the perpetrator to justice. Swirly mobile-phone footage of the riot began to play – Dowell visible in black leather jacket stalwart among panicking men and women, baton-wielding policemen towering above their rearing mounts – and Singh turned away and continued towards the staircase.
Before he reached it, however, the stair doors opened and Bob Dowell himself appeared. No longer in uniform, he was wearing blue jeans, white T-shirt and a s
ingle-breasted black leather blazer. When he saw Singh he stopped and took off his Ray-Bans, and gave him a thin smile.
They were not friends.
Singh spoke first. ‘How is your arm?’
Dowell displayed his sling with another smile. ‘Caught one for the boys,’ he said in his growling Scots.
‘And you’re looking after the case yourself? As well as the Imperium investigation?’
‘Leading from the front, Raminder. There’s no other way. And how about you? Found that missing teenager yet?’
Singh hesitated. ‘Not yet.’
‘You’ll be wanting some more manpower.’
‘I’ve just been talking to the chief about that.’
‘Has a crime been committed?’
Singh said nothing.
‘Then you won’t get it,’ Dowell said. ‘A shame. I know how hard it is working on your own.’
He slipped his shades back on, and went, stocky and bandy-legged, towards the chief’s office, raising a hand in farewell without looking back, and Singh went up the stairs to his own office above.
His office had been a storeroom previously, a cramped, windowless space with marks on the walls of multiple shelves now removed and a partial desk installed in the small space away from the door. It was all that could be found for him, apparently, after his recent rehabilitation. Sitting there, he gave himself briefly to meditation. He thought about rehabilitation. He reflected on the paths of fate, so obscure and difficult to follow, and on people, both young and old, who lose their way – who go missing. As a Sikh, he believed in the notion of karma, that our actions are our fate, that we travel slowly towards a higher purpose, without understanding how.
He was the youngest DI in the city, the result of his discipline and diligence – and, some would say, lack of humour – but his professional ambitions had been frustrated by the mismanagement of two recent cases, in puzzling circumstances. After the failures of the Chloe Dow and Imperium investigation in May he had been, for the first time in his career, formally reprimanded; during the Pyotor Gimpel case the following month he had actually been suspended. Oddly, both cases had been successfully concluded. He thought about this. Faults he could acknowledge as his own, successes too. But the disruptions in his karma, he believed, were strangely linked to another person – a sixteen-year-old boy called Garvie Smith, who had interfered in both investigations. Now he had turned up again. It seemed uncanny.
He did not believe in the uncanny. He believed in truth, or revelation, however difficult. He gave himself a little shake. Philosophizing would not help him find Amy Roecastle. The first seventy-two hours were crucial. After that, the chances of a missing person returning safely diminished rapidly.
He thought about Amy setting out from home the night before, taking the dog with her, heading for Sophie’s house. What urgency, what fear, could have driven her out in the storm – and into the woods?
He looked at his watch. Without assistance, there was so much he had to do himself – to make contact with Forensics and the Missing Persons Bureau, make a start on identifying witnesses from Chi-Chi and Wild Mouse, organize the sweep of the woods. Too much. But he would do it. He lifted his phone and called Len Johnson, Chief Pathologist.
It was 14:30. Amy Roecastle had been missing for fourteen hours.
10
The summer afternoon ripened and faded. At ‘Four Winds’ the fencers completed their day’s tasks, put their tools back in their vans and drove home, leaving the shadows to creep slowly across the empty garden. Dr Roecastle sat in her living room with a cup of herbal tea, uselessly alternating between anger and indignation. Detective Singh turned on the overhead light and worked on in his makeshift office in the Police Centre. And at Flat 12, Eastwick Gardens, Garvie Smith and his mother, his uncle Len and aunt Maxie and their infant son Bojo ate their dinner. Scrambled fish and pumpkin fritters. Aromas of cinnamon and frying butter hung like a veil of spice in the steam: the smell of faraway Barbados, where Garvie’s mother had grown up.
It was a small flat, drab in layout but bright in furnishing, with one room for cooking and living, two bedrooms and a bathroom without a bath, situated on the top floor of a six-storey apartment block backed onto the ring road, just across from the car plant.
Uncle Len put out his plate for just a little more. Aunt Maxie frowned, and he said, in all innocence, that if he didn’t make use of the remaining scrambled fish he might just waste away. There seemed no danger of that. At one hundred and thirteen kilos, Len Johnson was the solidest thing in the room, not excluding the sofa. He was chief pathologist of the city police, an expansive, relaxed man who carried his authority with an air of ease.
He modestly suggested another rum punch, to go with the scrambled fish.
Outside the Forensics labs Aunt Maxie was in charge and, after her, Bojo, three years old, a tyrant of satiny skin and enormous dimples. Uncle Len didn’t mind; he liked it. With a fresh rum punch in his fist, he turned his goodwill on his sister.
‘Have you lost weight? What’ve you done with your hair? I don’t know why, but you’re looking good.’
It was true. Whatever the reason, Garvie’s mother seemed to have got younger. She was a broad, handsome woman with smooth black skin, a pretty mouth and a firm gaze. Her hair was newly braided and she was wearing a kaftan in bright orange and green.
Uncle Len winked at his nephew sitting opposite him. ‘Eh, Garvie?’
Garvie made no response. His mother was his mother. She had a loud voice, an over-developed sense of good behaviour and an irritating ability to detect bullshit. It was true, there had been changes recently, but they didn’t have anything to do with her looks.
New arrangements were in place now that Garvie had left school. They had a deal: he was paying her rent; she was treating him like an adult. She’d bought him a real-leather wallet, to put his first wages in, and because, as she put it, ‘Everyone needs to be given something once in a while’. He understood. From now on she would be giving him the occasional gift, not providing for him. She didn’t quiz him any more about what he was doing, or nag him, or inspect his bedroom, or get on his case about personal hygiene. But she didn’t always cook for him either. And, unexpectedly, she’d started doing stuff on her own, going out more herself, to the movies or for drinks with colleagues from work. It was a bit difficult getting used to.
‘Doing anything this evening, Garvie?’
‘No.’
‘Tired after a hard day’s work, eh?’
The truth was: his friends were busy. Smudge had gone with his brother to a van showroom out-of-town. Felix was helping out Tiger at Burger Heaven. Dani was working an evening shift in the back office of Imperium. The world of work: ruining their social lives.
And at that moment the doorbell went. A little look of surprise went around.
Garvie’s mother spoke into the intercom. ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Who? Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, come up, of course.’
A few moments later Detective Inspector Singh walked in.
‘Raminder!’ Uncle Len got up to greet him.
Singh stood there, looking out of place. He was still in uniform. He had come from work, he said, in the hope of finding Len there. He had a question.
‘You could have called, Raminder. No need to come all the way out here.’
Singh looked shifty. ‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ he said. He turned to Garvie’s mother. ‘But I apologize. I’m interrupting.’ He looked around. Exchanged a wary glance with Garvie.
‘We’re just finishing. Please. Have a drink. Sit down.’
Accepting a glass of water, he held it formally, almost reverentially, in front of him.
Uncle Len said, ‘You never get chance to say the important things at work, Raminder, so I’ll say it now. It’s good to have you back after all that nonsense.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What’s your question?’
‘I was going through the forensics report from Amy Roecastle’s h
ouse and couldn’t find anything on the coat Amy was wearing. An army jacket.’
‘Yes. German manufacture, well-made, double-lined. Heavy-duty sort of thing.’
‘I have a suspicion about it.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s big for her. At least two sizes larger than her other clothes.’
‘You think it didn’t belong to her?’
‘I wonder. Will your report throw any light on it?’
‘Doubtful, I’m afraid. It was soaked right through. Really drenched. Most of the biology will have been damaged.’
They were all silent for a moment.
Singh said to Garvie, ‘It was a surprise to see you up there today, Garvie. I hope fencing is proving interesting.’
Uncle Len turned to Garvie in surprise. ‘You’re working at the house of the girl who’s disappeared?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘No one asked.’
Garvie’s mother said, ‘I know Dr Roecastle from the hospital. She’s a difficult woman.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
She fixed her son with a suspicious look. ‘You haven’t been bothering her, have you, Garvie? She might be difficult but I can’t help feeling sorry for her right now.’
‘No need. She’s sorry enough for herself.’
‘I hope you’re not interfering.’
Singh said cautiously, ‘In fact, Garvie has been helpful.’
They were all frankly astonished.
Singh described the finding of the Roecastles’ dog.
‘But what were you doing in the woods in the first place?’ his mother asked.
‘Cigarette break.’
Frowning, Garvie’s mother asked Singh about the investigation. He admitted to both anxiety and frustration. Working on his own, progress was going to be slow. Long hours would not be enough. Without formal assistance, he needed luck. But there had been no luck so far. Since the public announcement of Amy’s disappearance that morning, the police had received several sightings from members of the public – Amy on a bus with a bloody bandage round her head; Amy behaving strangely in the shopping centre in town – but none of them could be confirmed; they were the usual dramatic imaginings of people reacting to the drama of the news. What they now knew for certain was more worrying still.