‘What do you know about the dead girl?’ Emma asked Sam. Sam gave her a rather quizzical look but answered, ‘Sara Henratty, aged sixteen. She was the girl I mentioned before, the one who disappeared from the children’s home. I had a word with the PC who found the body and he said that it looked as if she’d been strangled. Then your husband arrived and stopped us asking any more questions.’
‘He was only doing his job,’ said Harry.
‘Maybe,’ said Sam. ‘But this proves that I was right. There was something sinister about Sara’s disappearance. I couldn’t get close to the body but it looked as if she was wearing a Roedean cloak. That’s a definite link to Rhonda.’
Emma wanted to tell Sam about the nametag but she knew that this was the sort of detail the police liked to keep to themselves so that it was known only to them and to the perpetrator of the crime. She contented herself with saying, ‘It certainly looks like there’s a link.’
‘I’m going to do some more digging on Louise,’ said Sam. ‘I’m calling on Pete, my doctor friend, as soon as I’ve finished my chips. He’s got a break in half an hour.’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ said Emma. ‘Surely the coroner must have taken the body hours ago.’
Sam shrugged. ‘We wanted to get some pictures and, I know it sounds ghoulish, but sometimes people visit the scene. Relatives and friends, sometimes even the murderer comes back to have a look. You’d be surprised.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Emma. She knew that murderers were often drawn back to the scene of their crimes. ‘Have you seen anyone?’
‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Poor Sara. It seems that nobody cares about her. I thought I’d go to see Peanuts, the ex-boyfriend, too. He might have something more to say. I talked to him before when I was investigating Sara’s disappearance. He’s a nice boy. A mad keen mod.’
‘I wonder if anyone’s told him that Sara’s dead,’ said Emma. She thought that it was just the sort of detail that would slip Bob’s mind.
‘It’ll be in the papers tomorrow,’ said Harry.
Sam finished the last of her chips. ‘Today’s paper,’ she said, ‘tomorrow’s chip wrapping. Why don’t you come with me to see Pete, Emma? Harry’s got a car.’
‘I should take Johnny on the beach. He’d love the rock pools.’
‘He’d prefer a drive in Uncle Harry’s Mini,’ said Sam in her most persuasive voice.
‘Oh, all right then,’ said Emma. ‘But I have to be back in time to pick the girls up from school.’
Fourteen
‘I’m sorry about that.’ Sir Crispian sounded as abashed as Edgar had ever heard him. Lady Miles had been taken away by the woman who—Edgar now realised—had been wearing a nurse’s, rather than a maid’s, uniform.
‘Valerie’s never been the same since Rhonda went missing that time,’ Sir Crispian continued, sinking heavily into a William-Morris-patterned armchair. ‘She blamed herself. That’s why she keeps thinking that the police are coming to arrest her.’
‘But that was six years ago,’ said Edgar. ‘Has Lady Miles seen a . . .’ He was going to say ‘psychiatrist’ but changed it to ‘doctor’.
‘Oh, she’s seen all sorts of trick cyclists,’ said Sir Crispian. ‘But they never do any good. Occasionally she has spells when she’s almost . . . normal . . . but this latest thing, with Rhonda, it’s set her right back. I’ve had to employ a full-time nurse. Valerie has moments when she’s almost . . . frantic. She’s attacked me, she’s threatened to kill herself. She tried to throw herself out of the window the other day. Then, suddenly, she’s talking about Rhonda as if she’s in the other room.’
‘She seemed . . . angry with you,’ said Edgar. This was rather an understatement when Valerie Miles had actually accused her husband of killing their daughter.
‘Sometimes she blames me,’ said Crispian, ‘sometimes she blames herself. It’s rather hard to take.’
Sir Crispian put a hand over his eyes. Edgar saw the liver spots on the back of it and felt another lurch of sympathy. No wonder Sir Crispian was so angry all the time. His daughter was missing and so, it seemed, was his wife. He said, ‘Don’t give up hope, sir. Sara Henratty’s death was a tragedy but we’re hoping that it will provide clues that lead us to Rhonda. I’ve got every available officer working on the case.’
Sir Crispian looked at him, his eyes dull. ‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘I’ve known that from the beginning.’
Edgar wanted to reassure him, to tell him that Rhonda would be found, but he knew that he couldn’t give that promise. It had been a week since Rhonda had disappeared and every passing day made a happy outcome less likely. Besides, there was something about the Weybridge house with its barred windows and poison-green furnishings that seemed to engender despair, to drain all hope from the situation. Valerie, locked in her upstairs room, was Mrs Rochester, the mad woman in the attic, but, like her fictional counterpart, did Lady Miles also have moments of clarity? She had accused her husband of murder. Edgar had been feeling sorry for Sir Crispian but there was no doubt that he was a hard and ruthless man. He had sent his daughter away to boarding school and claimed not to have even read her letters home. Could he conceivably be guilty of such a heinous crime? It’s too late, Crispian had said. How could be possibly know?
It was difficult fitting the pushchair into the boot of the Mini but eventually Emma managed it. They set off along the coast road, Sam in the front, Emma in the back with Johnny on her lap. He seemed enchanted by the car and started to make happy little humming noises. Maybe this was all he needed to keep him contented, a trip in a ramshackle car with a Union Jack painted on its bonnet. Emma could drive but there was nowhere to park a car by their Kemp Town house. Edgar used a police-issue Wolseley for work and for family outings. It was years since Emma had been behind the wheel. She thought of her father teaching her to drive, risking his beloved Rolls Royce in hair-raising trips up to Ditchling Beacon, Archie yelling ‘brake, girl, brake’ every time they came to a corner. Later on she’d had a boyfriend with a two-seater and, although she’d tired of Raymond fairly quickly, she’d never tired of bowling along the promenade, the wind whipping her hair back against her face. Picturing it now, it was as if she was describing another person.
They took the road up by the racecourse. A sea fret had blown in and the white railings loomed suddenly out of the mist. Emma remembered searching for two lost children here, years ago, when the ground had been covered in snow. The road into Brighton had changed since that time, new tower blocks dwarfing the terraced houses.
‘We went to photograph one the other day,’ said Sam. ‘Twenty storeys high. You wouldn’t catch me living there. It would be like being a canary in a cage.’
‘Apparently people agree with you,’ said Harry. ‘I read that most of them are still empty.’
Emma looked back at the new buildings, solid blocks of concrete and glass, their upper storeys lost in the fog. She tried to imagine living up there, high above the town, battered by wind and rain. You might feel God-like and omniscient but you might also feel lonely so far away from the comforting hum of street-level life. She thought of the missing children again from that case over a decade ago. They had lived in terraced houses on Freshfield Road, two-up two-down, no inside toilets, exactly the sort of ‘slums’ that were being demolished to make room for the new high-rise living, but Emma remembered that there had been a real community there, a sense of neighbours looking out for each other. She wondered whether you would ever get to know your neighbours, living in an eyrie in the sky.
They took the back road to the hospital and parked in the doctors’ car park. A young man in a white coat was sitting on a wall, smoking.
‘That’s Pete,’ said Sam. ‘Thanks for the lift, Harry.’
‘Shall I wait?’ said Harry. ‘I could drive you to collect your children, Emma.’
It was the first time he’d addressed her directly and, for some reason, Emma felt herself blushing. ‘It’s OK,’ she said. �
��The school’s not far from here.’
They got the pushchair out and installed Jonathan in it. He waved a sad farewell to the car as the Mini chugged away down the hill.
‘Emma,’ said Sam. ‘This is Pete. Dr Peter Chambers, I should say.’
‘Pete is fine.’ Dr Chambers stubbed out his cigarette and stood up to shake Emma’s hand.
‘Emma’s a detective,’ said Sam.
‘I used to be one,’ said Emma. She gestured towards the baby in the pushchair as if this explained everything. Which perhaps it did.
‘A girl’s been found dead on the undercliff walk,’ said Sam. ‘We think she might be linked to Louise’s disappearance.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Pete. ‘That’s awful.’
‘Can you tell us anything else about Louise?’ said Sam. ‘Anything that might help us find her.’
Pete was silent for a moment, fiddling with his cigarette packet as if he wanted to light another.
‘She was a nice girl,’ he said at last. ‘We worked together on my last ward. She was one of those nurses who always knows what to say to patients. Not too chatty but just knowing when they needed reassurance or cheering up. She told me once that she had always wanted to be a nurse but her parents had died when she was young and there wasn’t any money for training. She paid her way by modelling.’
‘Modelling?’ said Sam, in the same way she might have said ‘prostitution’.
‘Yes. Louise said that agencies were always looking out for coloured models. And she was very striking-looking. But she was shy really. She never went out with the other nurses. She said that she preferred to spend her evenings reading.’
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ asked Emma.
‘Not that I know of,’ said Pete but his blush had revealed something. If he wasn’t Louise’s boyfriend, thought Emma, he had certainly wanted to be.
‘Were you surprised when she suddenly disappeared?’ said Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Pete. ‘I mean, Louise wanted to be a nurse. It was her life’s ambition. Why would she give it up when she finally had a place at a teaching hospital? And that note. Why would she go to the West Indies? She didn’t have any close family there. She was born in London.’
‘Did she have family in London?’ asked Emma.
‘She mentioned an aunt once,’ said Pete. ‘Some cousins. I don’t think they were close.’
‘Did you see the note that she left?’ asked Emma.
‘No. One of the other student nurses told me about it. A girl called Harriet Francis.’ Sam wrote down the name. ‘Harriet said that Matron accepted the note at face value. That’s typical. Matron’s a cow. She was always trying to imply that Louise didn’t belong in the hospital.’
‘Because she was coloured?’ said Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Pete. His pleasant face suddenly looked quite fierce. ‘She’s a bigot, pure and simple. A racist. No better than a Nazi. We’ve got an Indian doctor, one of the best in his field, and Matron can hardly bear to talk to him.’
Emma had never heard the term ‘racist’ before and it was a long time since she’d heard anyone—and an Englishwoman, no less—compared to a Nazi. But she had no trouble believing that such prejudices existed, even in nice teaching hospitals.
‘Did Louise ever mention anyone hanging around the nurses’ home?’ said Emma. ‘Maybe a boyfriend of one of the other nurses?’
‘No,’ said Pete. ‘We didn’t talk about stuff like that. We mainly talked about books.’
He sounded as if this had been a big disappointment.
Edgar arrived back at the station in time for a conference with Bob Willis. This was a grand way of saying that Edgar sent Rita out to buy chips and bottles of ginger beer and the Superintendent and DI shut themselves in Edgar’s office for an hour. Edgar enjoyed these times with Bob. It reminded him of the days when he was the DI and Bob and Emma were his sergeants. They had handled some difficult, dangerous cases but there had always been the sense of working as a team, the three of them against the world. When Edgar and Emma had got married, she’d left the force and Bob had become his loyal deputy, then, when Hodges retired, Edgar was promoted to Superintendent and Bob to DI. Edgar had missed working with Emma but, for the first few years, he was still delirious with happiness that she had become his wife. It was only recently that he had begun to wonder how much Emma herself missed those days.
‘How did it go in Surrey?’ said Bob, selecting a chip and eating it carefully. He ate maddeningly slowly. Edgar often wondered how Betty put up with it.
‘Strange,’ said Edgar. ‘I met Lady Miles and she’s clearly very disturbed. Sir Crispian said that she had a breakdown when Rhonda went missing the first time. Apparently she thinks that the police are going to arrest her.’
‘What for?’
‘For neglecting her daughter, I suppose.’
‘But she wasn’t neglected, was she? She was just walking home from ballet class. It sounds as if Sir Crispian and Lady Miles showered her with everything: ballet lessons, expensive boarding school, the lot.’
‘Or they sent her away? I think that’s how Lady Miles might have seen it. She actually turned on Sir Crispian and accused him of killing Rhonda.’
Bob let his chip fall back onto the newspaper. ‘Sir Crispian’s wife accused him of killing their daughter?’
‘Yes, it was quite chilling. I even wondered for a moment if she could be right but it wouldn’t explain the other disappearances and I just can’t believe it. Sir Crispian is a bully but he does seem to love his daughter. And he was very kind to his wife. I felt sorry for him, living there with her.’
‘You have to watch that, feeling sorry for people,’ said Bob, as if he were the superior officer.
‘It’s part of being a good policeman,’ said Edgar, ‘showing empathy. You’re pretty empathetic yourself.’
He could see Bob trying to work this one out. He said, ‘Do you think that Rhonda thought that her parents had sent her away? Do you think she was unhappy?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar. ‘I remember Sir Crispian saying that, after the first kidnapping, Rhonda had really wanted a dog but he sent her to Roedean instead.’
‘It’s a fantastic school though,’ said Bob. ‘So big and grand, like a castle. I wish Betty and I could afford to send the children there.’
‘Except that they’re boys,’ said Edgar.
Bob reddened, as he always did if he was teased. ‘You know what I mean. I wish we could send them to private school.’
‘Private schools aren’t always the best option,’ said Edgar. ‘Max hated his.’
‘I bet you end up sending Marianne and Sophie to Roedean all the same,’ said Bob, sounding rather truculent.
‘Emma would never hear of it,’ said Edgar. ‘What about Sara Henratty? Not much privilege there, I expect. You and Connolly went to see her aunt, didn’t you?’
‘Great-aunt. Yes. Nice old lady, living in Seaford. She hadn’t seen Sara for years though. She said that Sara’s mother, Bernadette, had been taken in by a thorough rotter and got pregnant by him. He deserted her so Bernadette brought up Sara on her own until she died of TB. It’s a sad story.’
‘It certainly is. Do you know what became of Sara’s father, the rotter?’ Edgar was always amused when Bob used words that seemed to come from a Victorian melodrama. Where did he get them from?
But Bob was nothing if not thorough. ‘I checked the prison records,’ he said, ‘and sure enough he’s inside, serving five years for theft at Ford Open Prison.’
‘Ford? That’s where Ernest Coggins is. The man who abducted Rhonda.’
‘Well, it’s the only prison round here. Except Lewes, of course, but Malcolm Henratty sounds like a petty criminal, he wouldn’t need high security.’
‘Are you going to see him? Henratty?’
‘Yes. I mean, he deserves to know that his daughter’s dead, even though he never seemed to want anything to do with her when she was alive.’
�
�Anything else about Sara? Poor girl. She doesn’t seem to have had a very happy life.’
‘WPC Connolly had a good thought. The aunt mentioned how pretty Bernadette had been, how she could have been a model. Well, some of the girls outside the Ritz—you know, the Bobby Whatsit fans—said that Rhonda had been approached by a man saying that she should be a model. Sara was a good-looking girl. You’ve seen the photo of her with the mods. What if someone had approached her with the same story?’
‘That is a good thought,’ said Edgar. ‘Connolly is obviously a bright girl.’
‘She is,’ said Bob. ‘A bit rough around the edges but she’s got the makings of a good officer.’
Edgar had known Bob long enough to understand what this meant. Meg Connolly was not someone of whom Bob’s mother would approve.
‘I’ve told Connolly to go back to the Ritz, undercover again, and see if she can get anything more from the fans. That could be our man’s modus operandi, telling girls that they should be models, luring them away with promises of stardom.’
‘Tell WPC Connolly to be careful,’ said Edgar.
It was mid-afternoon by the time that Max got back to Brighton. It was time, he thought, to complete the Florence tour. Fortifying himself with a double whisky at the Railway Tavern, he walked up the hill (another hill!) to Montpelier Crescent, the house where she had died. This was an expensive area of Brighton, tall white houses with wrought-iron balconies looking out over a semicircle of lawn containing a may tree in full flower. Looking at the street in the soft spring sunshine, Max found it hard to believe that anything bad had ever happened there. In fact, his main memory was of calling on Florence one morning and drinking coffee in the elegant sitting room. They had faced each other across the burnished parquet floor, talking politely and knowing that they were going to end up in bed together. That room, though, was where she had died. Edgar had never described the crime scene to him but the papers had got hold of some of the details and these, now, were as clear to Max as if he had been there: Florence stretched out naked on the sofa, her dark hair touching the floor, a gold crown on her head, feather boa around her neck in morbid imitation of Cleopatra’s asp.
Now You See Them Page 10
