‘Someone’s been living here,’ said the DI. He moved closer, followed by O’Neill. Meg was glad that Danny and Tony Peters had stayed outside. It meant that there was just room for her to peer over the DI’s shoulder.
He picked up the bucket and put it down again quickly. ‘Stinks of urine.’
That was the smell that Meg had noticed earlier.
‘There are some cigarette butts on the floor,’ said O’Neill. ‘And some breadcrumbs. Jesus. Is this where he’s been keeping them?’
‘Well, they’re not here any more,’ said the DI. ‘Where does this tunnel go, WPC Connolly?’
‘Back to the shop,’ said Meg. ‘The other end is blocked. But Tony, Mr Peters, says that there are lots of tunnels in Rottingdean. The smugglers used to use them, apparently.’
The DI sighed. ‘We’ll have to search them all. But it’s a definite lead. The first we’ve had. Well done, WPC Connolly. It’s proof that the girls were together too. Those look like a schoolgirl’s shoes to me.’
‘And those look like they belong to a TV star,’ said Meg.
‘But why did he leave them here?’ said O’Neill.
‘Like the super said, they could be trophies of some kind. Or else he’s leaving us a clue, trying to mislead us. Like the hat in the Roedean tunnel.’
Meg had discovered that too. Was the kidnapper, the killer, deliberately leaving things for her to find? It was a disconcerting thought. She took out her own torch and shone it slowly round the claustrophobic space, thick with the smell of ammonia and the sea.
‘Look,’ she said.
On the wooden door, someone had made a number of marks with a piece of chalk. Vertical lines, all of similar length. There were twenty or thirty of them.
‘What’s that?’ said O’Neill.
‘I think it’s the number of days that they were kept here,’ said Meg.
Twenty-One
‘It’s hers,’ said Emma. ‘She was wearing them at Diablo’s funeral.’
She’d been surprised when Edgar turned up at lunchtime. Pleased but also slightly embarrassed because she’d bought all the papers to see if any of them mentioned Ruby’s disappearance and they were spread out on the kitchen table. When Edgar’s feet started descending the basement steps, she shoved the newspapers to one side and tried to look as if she was concentrating on her son and heir, who was absorbed in rubbing jam into his hair.
‘Hallo, Em. Hallo, Jonathan. You look very jammy.’
Emma dabbed at Johnny with a cloth. ‘He always gets food everywhere,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Came to see my wife.’ Edgar came round the table to kiss her, avoiding Johnny’s outstretched hands. ‘Actually, I wanted your opinion on this.’ He held up a paper bag and, with a slightly theatrical air, shook its contents out on the table. Emma stared at a single high-heeled sling-back shoe.
‘Do you recognise it?’ asked Edgar.
And of course she did. Ruby had been wearing these shoes with her black-and-white outfit at Diablo’s funeral. She said as much and then the significance of the find struck her. Suddenly the single shoe seemed ominous, a sinister Cinderella. And wasn’t it bad luck to put shoes on a table?
‘Where did you find it?’ she said.
‘In a tunnel under a Rottingdean shop,’ said Edgar. ‘The owner telephoned the station this morning. WPC Connolly visited on her own initiative. It’s a real breakthrough. The tunnel comes out at the exact place where Sara Henratty’s body was found.’
Emma bit back the words ‘bully for WPC Connolly’. ‘So this proves that Ruby has been abducted,’ she said.
‘I think so,’ said Edgar. ‘I’ve left a message for Max. There are signs that someone—several people—have been living in the tunnel but there’s no one there now. Bob’s organising a search of all the tunnels. There are loads of them in Rottingdean, apparently.’
‘Of course there are,’ said Emma. ‘Kipling lived in Rottingdean and it’s where he wrote that poem. “A Smuggler’s Song”. Haven’t you ever read it? “Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.”’
‘I haven’t read much Kipling,’ said Edgar. ‘I can never forgive him for “If”. But, if we can find the girls in one of these smugglers’ hideouts, that would be terrific. I’m worried that it’s escalating. First he murders Sara and now he’s kidnapped Ruby, someone in the public eye. It’s almost as if he wants to be noticed.’
‘Are you going to tell the press about Ruby?’ said Emma.
‘We’ll have to think it through very carefully,’ said Edgar. ‘On one hand, Ruby’s so high-profile the public will get involved and that might be helpful. On the other, it might panic the kidnapper into harming one of the girls. He has already killed Sara, perhaps because she tried to escape.’
‘Maybe publicity’s what the kidnapper wants,’ said Emma. ‘It struck me just now. All the girls have been in the papers. Rhonda because of the chess competition. Louise in that picture with the other nurses. Sara in the mod photo. And Ruby’s in the papers all the time.’ She thought of Astarte’s hands hovering over the news cuttings. He has them in a cage.
‘That’s a very interesting theory,’ said Edgar, looking at her as if she was still DS Holmes, his brightest sergeant.
‘It just came to me,’ said Emma. She could feel herself blushing.
‘You’re the cleverest blonde I know,’ said Edgar. This was an old joke between them, going back to the time when Superintendent Hodges had told Emma that she was quite intelligent ‘for a blonde’. ‘I must be getting back,’ said Edgar, kissing her again. ‘I might be late tonight. Bye, Johnny. Give my love to the girls.’ He dropped a kiss on his son’s head, avoiding the jam, and made for the door.
‘Bye,’ said Emma. She hardly noticed that Johnny had started to cry. An idea was starting to take shape in the Holmes brain.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.
Edgar was not surprised to see Max waiting for him at the police station. His friend was as smartly dressed as ever but his habitual air of sang-froid was missing as he accosted Edgar.
‘I got your message. Is it Ruby?’
‘We haven’t found her and it’s not bad news,’ said Edgar, steering Max towards the doors. He’d spotted two reporters hovering. ‘But it is a lead. Come into my office.’
In the basement room with the painting of Henry Solomon looming over them, Edgar explained about finding the shoes in the tunnel.
‘Rottingdean,’ said Max. ‘Why on earth would they be there?’
‘There’s a network of tunnels under the village,’ said Edgar. ‘I’ve got men searching them now. They’re all over the place. Under the church, under the village hall, under most of the shops. If the shoes are there, it’s possible the girls are there.’
Once more, Edgar put the shoe on the table. Max immediately recognised it from the funeral. Edgar remembered that Max had an unerring ability to recall what people were wearing. It helped with magic tricks, apparently.
‘So this proves that Ruby’s with the other girls,’ said Max. ‘Rhonda and the others.’
‘Rhonda and Louise, we think,’ said Edgar. He didn’t remind Max what had happened to the third girl.
Max covered his face with his hand. Edgar noticed, with surprise, that Max was wearing a wedding ring. Also that the hand was shaking. He wondered if his friend was crying but, when Max looked up, his eyes were dry and had the fierce, determined look that Edgar remembered from their Magic Men days.
‘Why have they been taken?’ he said. ‘There hasn’t been a ransom note for Ruby. Have there been for the others? The Roedean girl must be well-off.’
‘No,’ said Edgar. ‘There’s been no contact from the kidnapper at all. Rhonda’s father was sure that she had been abducted for money. It’s happened before.’ Briefly he told Max about Ernest Coggins.
‘But what can this Coggins person have to do with Ruby?’
‘Nothing as far as I can see,’ sai
d Edgar. ‘But it is an odd coincidence, him escaping from prison like that.’
‘Is there anything that links the girls?’ asked Max.
‘We’ve following up a lead about modelling,’ said Edgar. ‘It’s tentative as yet but Rhonda and Sara were both approached and told that they could be models. Louise had once done some modelling for an agency called Angels.’
‘Angels,’ said Max. ‘Angels. Why does that ring a bell? But Ruby doesn’t seem to fit the pattern. She wouldn’t be interested if someone offered her modelling work. She doesn’t exactly need the money. I mean, she’s famous. Since I’ve been back in England I’ve been surprised how famous she is. People recognise her in the street.’
‘Emma’s got a theory that it’s all linked to press coverage,’ said Edgar. ‘Ruby’s always in the papers but Rhonda was featured because she won a chess competition and Louise was in a group photo of nurses from the hospital.’
‘If Emma thinks that then we should consider it,’ said Max. ‘Funnily enough, Joe said something similar. He said that whoever had taken Ruby had done it so that they could be in the papers.’
‘But, in that case, why haven’t they contacted us? Raised the stakes?’
‘Maybe that’s what the shoes were all about. A clue for you to find. Misdirection.’
‘We’ll have to say something to the press about Ruby’s disappearance. Maybe we should try to start a conversation with the kidnapper.’
Max was silent, thinking. Then he said, ‘That’s a good idea. Appeal to his vanity. Say that it’s a brilliantly conceived trick.’
‘Trick?’ This seemed an odd way for Max to refer to the kidnapping of his daughter.
‘It’s a trick all right,’ said Max. ‘I’m sure of it. Making a woman disappear is a classic stage illusion. Of course, it’s bringing her back that’s the difficult part.’
Max was silent for a moment and, when he spoke, his voice wasn’t entirely steady. ‘We have to find her, Ed. I’ve been a rotten father to Ruby. I can’t help thinking that, if it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have been in the public eye at all. It’s not what Emerald wanted for her. If Ruby hadn’t tracked me down and become my assistant, she’d probably be happily married to a bank manager by now. I’ve done nothing for her except put her in danger.’
‘We’ll find her,’ said Edgar. He had reasons of his own for feeling guilty about Ruby.
‘You must be mad,’ said Sam.
They were sitting in a café near the Argus offices. The Roma was one of Tol’s original coffee bars and was the first establishment in Brighton to possess an Italian coffee machine, a stylish chrome affair that produced clouds of aromatic steam. There were stools at the bar and discreet booths where you could sit for hours over a cappuccino. Today the place seemed to be full of art students, long-haired and confident, their portfolios lying on the floor beside guitar cases and army surplus rucksacks. Emma and Sam were the only customers over thirty and Emma was certainly the only person with a baby in a pushchair.
Emma took a sip of coffee and handed Jonathan a rusk. ‘It’s bait,’ she said. ‘I’m bait. Remember what Astarte said? He hasn’t got a blonde. Well, I’ve got blonde hair.’ She pulled a lock from behind her ear and dangled it for Sam’s inspection. ‘If there’s an article about me in the paper, he might see it and . . .’
‘And what? Kidnap you? Well, that’s a great idea, Emma, I must say. One of your best.’
‘We’ll say in the article that I’m always in a certain place at a certain time and we’ll see if he turns up.’
‘And what if he does?’
‘You can be there. Hidden behind a tree or something. We can confront him. Or at least get a description. It’ll be flushing him out into the open.’
‘If he reads the article. If he’s in Brighton. That’s a lot of ifs.’
Emma thought of Edgar’s dislike of the poem ‘If’. ‘He must be local,’ she said. ‘What about the shoes in the tunnel? He must know Rottingdean really well. He knew about the Roedean tunnel too.’
Sam knew about the discovery in Rottingdean. She had been there that morning with Harry, taking photographs of the police search parties. That’s why, when Emma had rung her, saying that she had news about the case, Sam had been keen to meet. Now, she didn’t look so happy. She was frowning as she stirred cream into her coffee.
‘Look,’ said Emma. ‘If he doesn’t come, then we haven’t lost anything. I just think it’s worth a try. Think of Rhonda and Louise. Think of Ruby.’
‘I didn’t know you were so fond of Ruby.’
‘I think I have grown . . . well, fond’s not the word . . . used to her over the years. She’s part of our lives. She’s Max’s daughter. He’d be devastated if anything happened to her.’
As Emma expected, the mention of Max made Sam look thoughtful. ‘Why would we publish an article about you anyway?’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be rude but you’re not exactly a household name. My editor’s not going to jump at the idea.’
‘There must be something,’ said Emma. ‘I was the first woman detective sergeant in Sussex.’
‘A long time ago,’ said Sam. She fiddled with her spoon for a few minutes before breaking into one of her rare grins. ‘Come to think of it, there is a piece we could do on you. You’d hate it though. Every month we publish a feature on the wives of prominent men in the community.’
Emma winced. ‘What’s it’s called?’
‘“Behind every famous man”.’
Twenty-Two
Max was on his way back to London. It had come to him in a flash when he was shaving that morning. R. Porter Bespoke Garments; B. Price and Co; Angels Modelling; Tommy’s Travel You Trust; Henry Oberman, Notary; J. Passolini, Theatrical Agent. The modelling agency was in the same Notting Hill house that Joe used as his business headquarters. Should he tell Edgar? No, Edgar would only send Bob and the rest of the flat-footed bobbies charging in. He’d go himself and see what he could discover. It was better than sitting in his hotel room, waiting and worrying.
The street was as shabby as ever, its only occupants some slouching teens who looked as if they might be some of Joe’s mod friends. Max pressed the bell beside Angels. There was a crude drawing beside the name, just a triangle with a circle on top and a halo around the circle. Not exactly a high-class outfit. He rang again. No answer. He was just wondering what to do when the door opened.
‘Maxie!’
If Joe had been surprised to see Max on Monday, now he looked positively astounded. He backed away, like someone who has discovered a rabbit in their top hat.
‘Hallo, Joe.’
‘What is it? Is it Ruby? Have you had any news?’
Joe really did look genuinely concerned. Max took pity on him. ‘There have been a few developments. Can we talk inside?’
‘Sure,’ said Joe. ‘I was just going to the barber’s.’ Max noticed that the agent’s hair, rather than being greased back as usual, fell limply to his collar. It made him look much younger.
They climbed the stairs to Joe’s office where the Bay of Naples looked down on them. Max told Joe about the shoes in the tunnel.
‘Bloody hell. You don’t think he’s got Ruby shut up in there?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Max, ‘but I’m afraid it looks like she might be with the other abducted girls. Joe, what do you know about the modelling agency downstairs? Angels?’
‘Lou and Sally? They’re OK. They’ve taken a few pictures of Ruby over the years.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve done some photoshoots with Ruby. They did one in her flat for Vogue. Why? What’s the matter?’
‘Do you know where they are today, this Lou and Sally? They’re not answering the door.’
Joe gave a sly smile. ‘Well, none of us answer the door if we don’t know who’s on the other side of it.’
‘You did when I called round before.’
‘Yes, but I’m a risk-taker, like all Italians. Lou and Sally are a bit more caut
ious. They’re in, I’m sure of it. I saw Sally making coffee in the kitchen earlier. Come on.’
On the floor below there was a door with the same triangular angel painted on it. Joe knocked and, sure enough, it opened cautiously.
‘Sally, my little darling. I’ve brought a friend to see you.’ Sally wasn’t what Max had imagined. She was greyhaired and middle-aged, wearing a trouser suit with glasses on a chain round her neck. Lou was a heavily built American with white hair and battered features.
‘Max has got a few questions for you,’ said Joe, insinuating them both into the room.
‘Say,’ said Lou. ‘You’re that actor. I saw you in The Conjuror.’
It still felt odd to be called an actor rather than a magician. Max owned up to the film.
‘You’re married to Lydia Lamont,’ said Sally. She was as stereotypically English as her husband was American.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Max. They were in a very strange room, bigger than Joe’s and retaining some of the elegant dimensions of the original house, but with blackout curtains covering the sash windows. The high walls were covered with a variety of materials; one corner was wallpapered, another was tiled, a fur rug was tacked up on one wall and what looked like artificial grass stuck on another. On another wall was a collage of photographs: the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, Brighton Pavilion, the Eiffel Tower.
‘What’s the grass for?’ said Max.
‘It’s for glamour shots,’ said Sally. ‘If the models stand against the wall it looks like they’re lying down.’ The rest of the room was filled with cameras, trolleys and tripods. Max imagined a woman, naked or half dressed, standing against the grass-covered wall with the cameras trained on her like guns. It must be desperation that brought people to studios like this, even if it was only desperation to be famous.
‘Max is Ruby’s father,’ said Joe. ‘You remember Ruby Magic? You took the pictures for that Vogue article.’
Now You See Them Page 16
