The Various Haunts of Men (29 page)

‘I have to go.’

He neither tried
to stop her nor leaped up, eager to see her out. He simply sat on, relaxed and still in the light of the lamp.

‘Thank you for this,’ Freya said. ‘I went to choir so that my mind would stop spinning the case round and round, and singing and then coming here really have given me what I needed.’

‘Rest and refreshment. It’s important to get as far away as possible from this sort of case … if not
physically, then spiritually, mentally. It can drain you otherwise.’

Then he did get up and stroll across to the door with her. ‘I’ll come down,’ he said.

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘It is late, it is dark, there is no one about at this time and you are on your own.’

She laughed. ‘Simon, I’m a police officer.’

He put the flat door on the latch and looked at her, his handsome face stern. ‘And two women
are missing.’

She looked at him for a long minute. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘I wish I was not thinking about them the way I am,’ Simon said, touching a hand to her back to guide her as she began to descend the stairs. The touch burned into her.

At her car, he held the driver’s door for her. She hesitated a fraction of a second. He did not move.

‘Thank you again.’

‘My pleasure. Goodnight,
Freya.’

He lifted a hand and stood watching until she had driven down the close to the arch at the far end and away.

Mr Victor Freeborn disappeared from the Four Ways Nursing Home some time after four o’clock in the afternoon. No one had seen or heard him come downstairs and go out of the front door, which Mrs Murdo the secretary found unlatched when she slipped out to the postbox at five to five.

It was not until twenty past six that the police patrol car brought Mr Freeborn back, having found him
sitting on a bench beside the river wearing nothing but pyjamas and slippers.

It had happened before, but because of Angela Randall’s disappearance, Carol Ashton was in a greater state of anxiety than usual and it took the whole house a long time to settle down, by which time a carpenter had fitted a new, and more complicated, lock and they had had a staff conference about how else to tackle
what the housekeeper Pam Thornhill called ‘the Houdini problem’.

So it was after eight o’clock when Carol got home and picked up the
Echo
to read over a much needed gin.

The disappearance of Debbie Parker was the main front-page story. Her photograph, a fat girl giggling on an ice rink, was blown up to a dramatic size. Carol read the report quickly, looking for some mention of Angela Randall.
There was none. Yet the two cases seemed to have plenty of similarities.

But if the links were so obvious, why was there no reference to Angela? What were the police doing? Had her case simply been filed away and forgotten? Carol recalled the young, pretty, efficient-seeming Detective Sergeant Graffham, who had certainly not given the impression that she would put her notes of their conversations
in a drawer. She felt upset. Someone else was missing, Angela still was, and Carol thought she owed it to her colleague to remind the police of her name; she also felt angry, that she had reported something important and been sidelined.

She finished her gin and tonic, poured herself half an inch more, capped the bottle and went to the telephone.

‘I’m sorry, DS Graffham isn’t in,’ the voice answered.
‘Can anyone else help you?’

Carol hesitated. She didn’t want to have to tell the whole story from scratch to someone who knew nothing about it.

‘Can you tell me when she will be available?’

‘You could try tomorrow morning.’

‘Can I leave a message?’

She gave her name and number and asked for the sergeant to call her urgently.

But she won’t, she thought, going into the kitchen to start preparing
herself something to eat. In her experience, people, however charming and well intentioned, seldom did ring you back. She started to beat two eggs
for an omelette, but by the time she had got some salad things from the fridge, she was too restless to leave things until the next morning. She left the kitchen and went back to the phone.

‘Bevham and District Newspapers, good evening, how may I help
you?’

A few minutes later, she was speaking to someone called Rachel Carr. Forty minutes later the same Rachel Carr was ringing her doorbell.

‘Mrs Ashton, tell me about this lady who you say is missing – Angela Randall. I gather she works for you?’

She did not scribble notes in a spiral-bound book, she had put a small recording machine on the coffee table between them. Carol watched the little
chocolate-coloured spools go round as she talked, about herself and the Four Ways, about Angela, about her disappearance, about speaking to the police twice, and finally, about the shock of reading that another single woman had gone missing.

‘So of course I looked at the report expecting there to be something about Angela … well, it was obvious. Only there just wasn’t.’

‘Have you contacted the
police this evening?’

‘Yes, but the person I saw wasn’t there. They just suggested I ring tomorrow morning.’

‘Not really good enough, is it?’

‘I just don’t understand why they didn’t mention Angela.’

‘So you feel the police are being rather lax?’

‘Not exactly … I mean, we don’t know what’s going on, do we? I want to find out, that’s all. I’m puzzled. I owe it to Angela. She hasn’t got anyone
else to fight for her.’

The machine clicked and beeped and Rachel Carr reached down to change the tape over. She was a tall, sharp-faced young woman with oval designer spectacles and an expensive-looking pale suede jacket.

‘I know this is a difficult question to answer, but – what do you think has happened to Angela Randall? You seem quite sure she is not the sort of person to go off alone without
telling you or making contact.’

‘She’s the last person to do anything like that. The last person.’

‘Then?’

Carol looked at her own hands. The tapes hissed round and round. She was suddenly reluctant to say what she thought out loud, superstitiously fearing that to speak her worst fears might somehow make them come about.

‘In your heart, you think something has happened to her, don’t you?’

Carol Ashton swallowed. ‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice came out as a whisper. She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve no real reason for saying that, except … as time has gone on, I can’t see what innocent explanation there can be.’

‘I agree with you. And when you read about this other missing girl – Debbie Parker – what was your reaction?’

‘As I told you, I wondered why there was no mention of Angela … another
Lafferton woman who has gone missing in what seem like similar circumstances.’

‘Then what did you think?’

‘That there must be a connection between the two.’

She looked at the reporter, whose expression was both grave and expectant.

Then Rachel said, ‘I don’t want to distress you, Mrs Ashton, but after all, you’re not actually a relative of Miss
Randall’s so perhaps this isn’t too insensitive.
Do you think it likely that by now she may be dead?’

‘It’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘Do you think this other young woman might be dead too?’

‘Dear God, I hope not. It isn’t long, is it, she might have been found by now … it’s only a couple of days, not like Angela.’

The reporter said nothing, just looked at her and waited.

‘It’s too awful to think about … two of them.’

Silence.

‘If there were
a connection, it seems …’

Rachel Carr raised her eyebrows slightly but still let Carol speak.

‘It’s too awful to contemplate.’

‘Do you blame the police for the delay in finding anything out about Miss Randall?’

Did she? She wondered if she had already said too much, implied things she was not really sure about. All the same …

‘I’m angry,’ she said, ‘and I’m upset. It’s too long. And now this
new case … I’m quite frightened. I think anyone might be, don’t you?’

‘You think other Lafferton women have good reason to be frightened at the moment then?’

Did she? If it came to the worst …

After a moment, Carol Ashton nodded.

Rachel Carr broke the speed limit on her way back to the newspaper office – but then, she always did. That was what her red Mazda MX5 was for. She was also extremely
excited. This story had legs, she thought, and
she had been waiting for something like it for weeks; she could lead with it, give it some attitude, ask awkward questions of the police, stir up what she regarded as the semi-comatose Lafferton public. She imagined her byline across the front page day after day as she spearheaded a major press campaign.

Don Pilkington, the
Echo
’s editor, had gone
by the time she got back but the news editor, Graham Gant, was still at his desk. Rachel pulled up a chair and began to talk, not pausing for him to interrupt until she had filled him in on everything and outlined her plans.

Looking steamrollered, he reached for a copy of one of the national papers. ‘The police are a step ahead of us. The Commissioner of the Met has just admitted they all got
it wrong when they took bobbies off the beat and lost public confidence in them at the same time. People need to feel safe and bobbies patrolling make them do that. They’re recruiting hard and they plan to put foot patrols back.’

‘Yeah, right, like our government plan to put more doctors in hospitals and more teachers in schools … and how many have we seen? Have you been up to Bevham General
lately? Lafferton isn’t the Met, things take a long time to filter down, and in any case, the point is not what might be going to happen in the future but what is – or isn’t – happening here and now. I want us to go big on this one, Graham. Two women are missing so why have the police only told us about one? Both were known to go out alone on the Hill, neither was the sort to vanish without notice,
there are no traces of them and neither has been in touch … what are the police trying to cover up – their own incompetence? Why isn’t the Hill policed properly – it’s just the sort of
place where weirdos hang out, like the towpath where that flasher keeps jumping out on runners. Why haven’t the police caught him? Why –’

Graham Gant held up his hand wearily. ‘Whoa, one thing at a time, Rachel.
OK, you can get on to Lafferton and ask about this other missing woman. I think that’s important. Anything else, and certainly anything in the nature of an anti-police campaign, you have to run past the editor.’

‘I’ll ring him at home.’

‘You won’t get him, he’s at a big Masonic dinner in Bevham.’

Rachel snorted.

‘Let’s get the details about this other woman, do everything you can on that,
we’ll headline it tomorrow if there’s still no news on either of them – the police want us to keep this other missing girl in the public eye anyway. But wait till you can talk to Don before you start whipping up public anxiety.’

Rachel stormed across the room to her own desk in frustration. It was always the same, the big boys in league with one another, covering up for one another, scratching
each other’s backs. Half the police were Freemasons, that was well known, as well as half the lawyers, bankers and big businessmen in both Lafferton and Bevham, big boys playing little boys’ games. But that didn’t matter. When it came to deceiving the public and conspiracies of silence, it bloody well did.

Rachel sat at her desk staring into space for a moment, picturing the campaign she fully
intended to get permission to run, one way or another – and she was good at wheedling Don – and then taking her fantasy one step further to the point where her work on the
Echo
was
noticed in Fleet Street and a call came in for her to go and see the editor of the
Daily Mail
… Rachel Carr did not intend to remain in the backwaters of Lafferton for long.

She picked up the phone and put in a call
to the police station, but by now it was nearly ten, no one was in CID, and the duty sergeant could only give her the party line on the missing girl, said there was no recent news and would not comment on any other missing persons.

‘I suggest you ring back in the morning.’

‘And speak to?’

‘DS Graffham.’

‘What time does he wander in?’

‘She. DS Freya Graffham. Any time after nine. If she isn’t
available, you could ask to speak to DC Coates. Sorry I can’t be of more help to you tonight, madam.’

Rachel slammed the receiver down. She didn’t relish having to wait until the morning to get permission from the editor, then speak to some poxy woman detective, who would probably give her the stone-wall treatment or make her hang about until there was another press briefing.

An hour later,
she had written what she thought was a pretty cutting-edge piece. The story, and her angle on it, were too high-profile to be confined to the
Lafferton Echo
and, after all, she had tried to speak to the editor, had she not? It was hardly her fault if he was out at a Masonic dinner. She called up her address book and clicked on an entry.
[email protected]
[email protected]

I am attaching a piece
on the news which broke today on the missing Lafferton woman. I have key info which
has not been released. Story has implications of interest for the wider readership of the
Bevham Post
. I have been unable to contact my own editor but feel the news story is too urgent to leave overnight.

Good wishes,

Rachel Carr

[email protected]

She hesitated for a split second before clicking ‘Send’
and watching the message and its attachment fly off her screen.

Within five minutes, she was heading the Mazda for Hare End and the barn conversion she shared with her lover, county rugby captain Jon Blixen.

DCI Simon Serrailler was not given to shouting. He preferred to make his anger known by speaking softly and icily.

‘Freya, come in here please. Bring Nathan with you.’

The knock came in twenty seconds.