Charlie

by Lesley Pearse

  Angie paused and lit another cigarette, her eyes were welling with tears.

  ‘Go on,’ Charlie urged her.

  ‘I cuddled you, you was laughing and pulling at me ’air, and it made me cry ’cos you were so lovely and I wished you was mine. Anyway, Sylvie must’a known what was going on in me mind. She put you back in the pram and then cuddled me. I was dirty, Charlie, like a bleedin’ tramp, and she were in nice clothes, her ’air all done nice and everything. But she still ’eld me, comforted me, and I never forgot it. Funny ’ow things work out, ain’t it? ’Ere you are all these years later, in me kitchen drinking tea.’

  Charlie had a big lump in her throat. It was the only story she’d ever been told about her mother that portrayed her in a compassionate role.

  ‘I wish I’d known more about her,’ Charlie said wistfully. ‘You see, she never showed her feelings, not to me.’

  Angie put one hand on Charlie’s and squeezed it. ‘Some people just can’t, love. Maybe it’s ’cos of the way they was brought up, or things what ’appened to ’em. But just ’cos they don’t go round wif their ’eart on their sleeve, don’t mean they don’t feel.

  ‘Look at the way you’ve turned out! You’re a nice girl, nice manners, nice voice, smart as new shoes. Now, you didn’t get that way all on yer own, did you?’

  Charlie smiled weakly. She could see the point Angie was making. ‘I can see why Mum cuddled you,’ she said. ‘I want to.’ She got up from her chair and leaned over the older woman to hug her, resting her head on her shoulder for a moment. ‘You’re a really good woman,’ she murmured, that didn’t quite cover it but then she wasn’t used to being emotional with strangers.

  ‘And so was yer mum,’ Angie said stoutly. ‘Now, clear off and go down the police station. Then straight ’ome.’

  ‘Which one should I go to?’ Charlie asked. ‘Just any one?’

  ‘No, go to West End Central in Bow Street. That’s where they came from when they was asking questions about yer dad. No point in farting around in places where they know nothing about ’im.’

  It was after seven that evening when Charlie got home. Rita was out, the flat seemed cold and bleak without her, and after she’d telephoned Jack Straw’s Castle and found Andrew wasn’t back and his mother didn’t know where he was either, she lay down on her bed and cried.

  The police had been decent enough. They started out trying to fob her off with a young constable, but she’d stuck her ground and insisted she spoke to someone senior and eventually she was ushered into an interview room to speak to Detective Inspector Hughes.

  He was a jovial man around fifty, with a bald head and a big stomach that strained his shirt buttons, but he was a good listener. He didn’t seem the least bit confused that Charlie’s story was part present, part events of two years earlier. She showed him the handout Andrew had made, and the A to Z he’d marked with small crosses, but because of Angie she didn’t say she had Andrew’s notes with her too. He took down the details of the scooter, and said he would get the police in that area to look for it.

  ‘What makes you so sure this Daphne Dexter is behind his disappearance?’ he asked. ‘And how can you be so certain that she is your mother’s old friend and father’s mistress?’

  ‘I just know,’ she said stubbornly. She’d already told him all the many similarities, but she couldn’t say that it had been confirmed by Angie. ‘I feel it inside me.’

  He laughed, but not unkindly. ‘That’s hardly proof,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not, but don’t you think it’s significant that Andrew should go missing so soon after talking to people about my father in Soho? And ominous that people are afraid to talk about Daphne Dexter?’ Charlie argued. ‘And another thing. If I can put together that DeeDee and Dexter are the same person, why didn’t the police uncover it while Mum was still alive? The woman took over Dad’s club, and she was up on a drugs charge during the Sixties, I would have thought that made her pretty suspicious.’

  ‘Can you tell me why you are hiding where you got some of your information from?’ he asked, looking at her sharply.

  ‘No, because some of the people involved have made me promise I won’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they are afraid of her of course,’ she said indignantly.

  He smiled knowingly. ’That, Charlie, is exactly what makes police work so difficult. Almost every time a serious crime is committed we generally have a good idea of who is responsible, but getting people to speak up and act as witnesses is the tricky bit.

  ‘We might very well have our suspicions about this woman, but without evidence she has committed a crime we can’t put a case against her together. Being your father’s mistress isn’t a crime, and yourboyfriend has only been missing for twenty-four hours, so he might well be off somewhere playing cards and drinking. So what possible reason could we have for bringing her in for questioning?’

  ‘Do you mean you aren’t even going to try and find Andrew?’ she asked, tears spilling down her face. ‘Can’t you see if Daphne has abducted Andrew then it’s certain she’s got something she wants kept hidden? What could that be other than she knows exactly what happened to Dad?’

  ‘Now, let’s take it one step at a time. Of course we’re going to try and find Andrew,’ he said. ‘But London’s a very big city, so it might take some time. Now, you go on home now. The chances are he will turn up. When I was Andrew’s age I disappeared regularly, sometimes I didn’t even know where I’d been.’

  Charlie had never felt so frustrated in her entire life as when she left the police station. She knew Hughes thought Andrew was off somewhere with another girl. How long would he have to be gone before anyone took any action?

  She pulled herself together later and phoned Beryl on the off-chance he might have contacted her, but that made her feel even worse. Beryl told her he’d phoned during the week all excited about the information he’d got, and how she’d been scared for him and made him promise he wouldn’t go back to Soho again. Now Charlie had to be the one to pretend she was over-reacting and play down how worried she was.

  The telephone remained stubbornly silent on Sunday morning. Rita cooked roast beef and made a chocolate cake, but her attempts at being cheerful merely heightened the gloom rather than lifting it. It was raining again and a strong wind buffeted the windows. Charlie sat staring out at the road below, wondering why when just a couple of days ago in York she’d felt so full of life and optimism, she was suddenly thrown back to reliving the nightmares of the past.

  The telephone finally rang in the middle of the afternoon. Charlie jumped out of her chair, Rita rushed from the kitchen.

  It was Detective Inspector Hughes. ‘We’ve found Andrew’s scooter,’ he said. ‘It was in Tittmus Street, Shepherd’s Bush, an old lady rang her local station to report it. I’ve just come back from seeing her. It seems she saw a young man leave it there on Friday afternoon. He then went into a house a few doors away from her. She thought he must be something to do with the builders working on the house and thought no more about it. It was only this morning when she saw it was still there, and no sign of the builders, that she thought it was odd. So she rang the police in case it had been stolen.’

  Charlie’s heart leaped with hope. ‘Have you been to the house to see if he’s there?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said crisply. ‘There is no one living in the house, and hasn’t been for six months. Tomorrow we’ll make a check on who owns it. But meanwhile we’ve brought Andrew’s scooter back here for safety.’

  ‘Is that all you can tell me?’ Charlie burst out.

  ‘No, there is one thing more. In the locked box on the back we found Andrew’s helmet, jacket and a letter. That letter appears to be a reply to his handout. It was from a Martha Grimsby who claimed she was a barmaid in Soho during the Fifties, inviting him to come and meet her in Tittmus Street.’

  ‘So that’s how she got hold of him!’ Charlie exclaimed. ‘It is Daphne Dex
ter, I know it is.’

  ‘Maybe,’ the policeman said more gently. ‘We are checking the letter now for fingerprints, and to pinpoint the kind of typewriter it was written on. We are also trying to trace the builders working on the house. If any further news comes in I will contact you immediately.’

  ‘What about Andrew’s parents?’ Charlie said fearfully. ‘Have you told them yet?’

  ‘Someone from the Oxford police is on his way to speak to them now,’ he said. ‘Do you have a recent photograph of him?’

  ‘No.’ Charlie felt her knees sagging under her and had to sit down. ‘Neither of us had a camera.’

  He must have heard the break in her voice and realized she was crying. ‘Try and keep calm, Charlie,’ he said gently. ‘I know that’s easy for me to say, but allowing yourself to get in a state won’t help. We have no evidence that anything bad happened to him in that house, indeed he might very well have gone off somewhere else on an impulse. But you said you found some notes Andrew had made while he was in Soho. I think we’d better have those. I’ll send someone round later to collect them from you.’

  Charlie put the phone down and looked up in horror at Rita standing by her chair.

  ‘Come on,’ Rita said, stroking Charlie’s shoulder, ‘tell me what they said.’

  Charlie related it all. ‘How can I give him the notes?’ she asked. ‘I promised Angie I wouldn’t tell them about her.’

  Rita was surprisingly cool-headed; she got the notebook from Charlie’s room, scanned through it, then calmly tore out the page about Angie. ‘There,’ she said, passing it back to Charlie. ‘And you needn’t feel guilty either, because you’ve told them everything she said.’

  ‘But –’ Charlie began.

  ‘No buts,’ Rita said. ‘I know about working girls like Angie. They have a hard enough time keeping body and soul together without police harassing them. That bloke Spud and the other couple of market men are the ones the police need to question.’

  ‘Have you got any idea where that house was you got taken to?’ Charlie asked Rita later that evening. A policeman had called to collect the notes around six; since then Rita had done some washing and now she was ironing. Charlie had tried to distract herself by watching television and reading the Sunday paper but her mind refused to budge from imagining Andrew being tortured.

  ‘Sort of,’ Rita said, pausing in ironing a blouse. ‘We went out of London on the A20. I know that road quite well because I had a boyfriend who used to do motor-racing at Brands Hatch. There’s a fantastic view over a valley a bit further on. We often took a picnic there, so even though it was dark, I recognized it by the lights in the distance as we passed by. Just after that we turned off the main road, and it was only about ten more minutes before we got to the house.’

  Charlie had never been south of London so she had no idea where Rita was talking about. ‘Could you show me on a map?’ she asked.

  Rita gave her a sharp look. ‘He wouldn’t be there!’

  ‘He could be, if it was her house. She might have just bought it to do up. The police said the house in Shepherd’s Bush was being done up too. Besides, I’m just curious.’

  Rita got a road map and pointed out where she meant. ‘The house could have been anywhere around here.’ She drew a big circle around a village called Borough Green with her fingernail. ‘But it wasn’t in a village, it was off the beaten track. I remember we went a long way up a winding lane with overhanging trees.’

  Charlie found it impossible to sleep that night. All the different bits of information she’d gathered about Daphne Dexter from her mother, Rita, Andrew’s notes and what Angie had said, were spinning round and round in her head. It didn’t make any sense to abduct Andrew, then let him go; he would go straight to the police. The only reason she could have for snatching him was to kill him.

  Andrew woke to find himself lying on the floor in total darkness. His mouth was dry and he had a headache. He thought he was on the floor in his room at the pub. But as he put his hand out, instead of finding the reassuring softness of a bed next to him, it met only cold stone.

  He screamed involuntarily, but the sound of his voice brought him to and he realized this wasn’t a nightmare but reality. He was lying on a thin, scratchy blanket, his shoes were off, and wherever he was it had a suffocating, musty, damp smell. The last thing he remembered was feeling sleepy and Martha saying she would open a window.

  Assuming he was still in the same house, he got to his feet and fumbled blindly in the darkness. The coldness of the stone floor struck through his socks, but he came to a wall after a few steps. It was no ordinary inside wall, but rough stone and damp to the touch. He crept along it feeling for furniture, doors or windows, anything to give him an idea of where he was. He felt two corners before he came to something which felt like a metal stand of some kind, and then eventually to a rough wooden staircase. He hauled himself up it, and found a door at the top. It was locked.

  He shook it first and called out, but when no one came he hammered, kicked and screamed at the top of his lungs. Then he stopped, struck motionless by a terrible fear. He could hear nothing beyond the door and there wasn’t even a chink of light.

  The fear grew stronger as he stood there, welling up from deep within him, intense and primeval, until he could smell it. He could hear his heart pounding, every hair on his body stood on end, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead and trickled down his cheeks.

  Afraid to go back down the stairs in the pitch darkness, he sank down in front of the door on to the top step, put his arms round his knees and sobbed uncontrollably.

  The cold brought him to. As he hugged his arms around his body he suddenly remembered he’d been wearing his tweed jacket earlier in the day and now he wasn’t. As his hands felt down his body he discovered he was now wearing a kind of boiler-suit. Could he have been sick and someone stripped him of his clothes?

  Remembering the blanket he had woken up on, he stood up again, and holding the rail with his right hand, with his left on the wall, he took a tentative step down. At the second step his left hand brushed against a switch, and suddenly there was light. It was so unexpected he yelled aloud in relief.

  The light was a dim single bulb and what it revealed did nothing to cheer him. He was standing on the second step of a crude staircase, looking down into a large windowless cellar, and all there was in it was a rusting wine rack against the wall to his right, and the blanket he’d been lying on in the middle of the stone-flagged floor.

  Going on down the stairs, he picked up the blanket and wrapped it round his shoulders. Tucked under the stairs was a bucket and a bottle of water, but despite his dry mouth, and a need to urinate, these alarmed him even more as they suggested that whoever had stuck him in here wasn’t coming back for some time.

  After closer inspection of his prison, he didn’t think the cellar was beneath Tittmus Street. He’d never known a small Victorian terraced house have such a large, well-built cellar, and the kind of ordinary people who lived in such houses didn’t go in for wine racks. So where was he?

  Lifting his wrist to see what time it was, he found his watch was gone. All at once he realized that in taking his clothes and shoes they’d also taken the entire contents of his pockets, penknife, wallet, address book, money and cheque-book. The only things of his own left were his underpants and socks. He broke down again then, crying like a child as it came to him that he had been drugged, stripped and redressed in this navy blue boiler-suit, then transported here unconscious.

  Some time later, huddled in the blanket on the stairs, he forced himself to try and think rationally. He was still woozy from whatever he’d been given, and not knowing where he was, or what time it was, was in a way worse than physical pain. It prevented him from working out how much longer it would be before someone became alarmed at his absence. Nor could he consider how help might come.

  There was a slim hope in his scooter. He hadn’t told that woman how he’d got to Shepherd’s
Bush, so it might still be parked in that road. Maybe the police would find it. But how long would that take? In an area like Shepherd’s Bush it might be there for weeks before anyone asked who it belonged to.

  Stan and Carol would be angry when he didn’t turn up for work. But they wouldn’t be alarmed immediately. If Charlie telephoned and found he wasn’t there, she’d believe he was off with another girl. In all probability it would be Sunday or even Monday before anyone got worried. And he didn’t even know what day it was now!

  He’d thought he was so smart acting out being a detective, but anyone with only half a brain would have taken the precaution of telling someone where he was going.

  ‘Okay, so you’ve been a blithering idiot,’ he said aloud. ‘But you do have a logical mind otherwise you wouldn’t be any good at maths, physics and electronics. So use your brain now and at least try to work out why that woman drugged you and brought you here.’

  Kidnapping for money as a motive could be discounted – it would be ridiculous as his parents had none. It had to be his inquiries into Jin Weish’s disappearance. Obviously Jin couldn’t have made off to escape debts or to start a new life with another woman, because no one would go to the trouble of abducting someone for that. So what would be serious enough for someone to go to such lengths?

  ‘Only a fortune,’ he said aloud. ‘Or murder!’

  Was it Jin who’d committed the crime and had orchestrated this? Or was he a victim of the same people behind it?

  Looking at the cunning way Martha had got him to the house, her poise and charm as she’d won his trust and got him to reveal everything he knew and suspected, then calmly drugged his coffee while he studied the photographs, she wasn’t some ex-barmaid who now worked in an office, but a scheming, clever and ruthless woman. Could she be Jin’s mistress?