Max paid the taxi driver and made his way up the neatly paved garden path. The door opened before he could knock. Bobby stayed back in the shadows, presumably to avoid being recognised by passing seagulls.
‘Max. Good of you to come.’ Even his voice sounded subdued.
Bobby looked even more incongruous sitting on the comfortable over-stuffed sofa with a fringed standard lamp looming over him and the Sussex Downs, now fading into the early twilight, visible through the French windows.
‘This is Wilbur’s house,’ he explained. ‘It used to belong to his parents. His mom died last year and he inherited it. I don’t think he likes being here without her, to be honest. He’s letting me stay for a few days. Do you want a drink? The liquor cabinet’s pretty well stocked.’
Max asked for a whisky and was pleased when Bobby went to the kitchen to add ice. The film star himself, he noted, was still sticking to orange juice.
‘Why are you staying here?’ asked Max, taking a gulp of whisky and feeling it burning its way down his throat. ‘And why did you want to see me?’
‘I just needed some downtime,’ said Bobby, once again speaking a foreign language. ‘It’s very stressful, heading up a film like this. All those meetings with backers and financial people. Wilbur’s great but it’s me they want to see. I’m the face of this film.’
‘Are you having trouble raising the money?’ asked Max. Maybe there was a chance that he could escape after all. But how could he return to America when Ruby was still missing?
‘No,’ said Bobby. ‘That’s all fixed. Having Massingham Hall helped a whole heap. Everyone’s real excited to start photography there.’
‘Glad I could help,’ said Max but he felt his heart sink.
He hadn’t told Lydia that they would be filming in his family home. She’d want to come over immediately and start shopping for tiaras.
‘The film’s going to be a smash,’ said Bobby. Max thought how violent show-business language was sometimes: smash hits, making a killing, dying on your feet. He wondered why, if funding was secured, Bobby didn’t look happier.
They were silent for a few minutes as, outside, the twilight deepened and swallows swooped into the fish pond. ‘The thing is,’ said Bobby, at last, ‘I wanted to explain about Ruby.’
‘Ruby?’ Suddenly the room seemed a shade darker.
‘I didn’t realise she was your daughter until you mentioned it that day at Massingham Hall.’
‘Didn’t you?’ It was Wilbur who had mentioned Ruby, Max seemed to recall. He had asked if she would inherit the house.
‘No. I mean, she never talked about you.’
‘So you know Ruby?’ This, certainly, had not been discussed.
Bobby shifted so that his face was in shadow. There was no sound apart from the ice clinking in Max’s drink.
‘I came to England last year,’ said Bobby. ‘Kind of incognito, scoping out this film, meeting with Wilbur and the rest of the guys. I met Ruby at a party and we went out a few times. I know she’s a bit older than me but she’s got such a young spirit. And she’s a beautiful woman.’
‘She is,’ Max agreed grimly.
‘So, when I came to London this time, we met up for a couple of dates.’
Had it been Bobby who was visiting Ruby that night at her flat? thought Max. Bobby, carrying a dark case? Containing what?
‘I was so shocked when I found out she was missing,’ said Bobby. He pronounced it ‘sharked’. ‘And then I got this letter. It was delivered to the Ritz on Monday and forwarded to me. I got it this morning.’
Wordlessly, Max took the sheet of paper.
Dear Bobby,
I’m sorry, I think it’s best if we don’t see each other any more. There’s no easy way to say this but I’ve met someone else. And, Bobby, I think you’d be happier with someone else too.
I hope we can still be friends.
Yours,
Ruby
It was, unmistakably, Ruby’s writing, bold and black with curly tails and flamboyant capitals. Max recognised it from her infrequent letters to him.
‘She finished with me.’ Bobby sounded extremely sharked. ‘Can you believe that?’
‘She says that she’s met someone else,’ said Max. ‘Do you know who that could be?’
‘No. She always had lots of admirers.’ Bobby’s tone was now positively sulky. ‘I thought I should tell you,’ he said. ‘The papers are saying that Ruby’s been kidnapped but this proves that she’s really just gone off with a man, doesn’t it?’
Was that what it proved? Max’s brain was in overdrive. If this letter was delivered on Monday then Ruby must have posted it on Saturday, the day that she was meant to be meeting Emma on the pier. Had she really just disappeared with her new boyfriend? But then he remembered. The other missing girls had all left notes, handwritten missives with plausible reasons for their absence.
‘Can I have the letter?’ he said.
‘Why?’ Bobby picked up the sheet of notepaper, which was lying on the coffee table, and held it close to his chest. Perhaps he thought that Max was going to sell it to the papers.
‘I’ve got a friend who’s a detective,’ said Max. ‘I’d like to show it to him. Don’t worry, he’ll be very discreet.’
‘OK,’ said Bobby, at last. ‘Just keep my name out of it, will you?’
‘Of course,’ said Max. He didn’t care if Bobby’s name was emblazoned on a banner between the piers if it meant that he got Ruby back.
It wasn’t possible to get a taxi in Rottingdean. The village looked like it went to bed very early and the High Street was deserted. A mist had blown in from the sea making the place seem even spookier, still and grey, a no-man’s land where the occasional landmark appeared with terrifying suddenness. Crossing the coast road was like walking into the unknown. Max was pretty sure that there was a bus stop somewhere about. He loathed buses. Even in London he liked to walk or catch taxis. He didn’t even mind the underground, at least it was quick and anonymous. But bus travel seemed to combine hours of waiting with slow, tedious journeys in the company of people who talked to themselves or, in worst-case scenarios, to you. But he didn’t fancy walking back by the sea, especially in this fog. The undercliff walk was where the poor girl’s body had been found, of course. Sara Henratty. Had she been killed by the same man who had abducted Ruby? Had Ruby been abducted or had she simply run off with this new man, the ‘someone else’ mentioned in her letter to Bobby?
The bus stop appeared in front of him. In fact he nearly walked straight into it. He was outside a pub, the White Horse. Should he go in and have a whisky, something to keep the chill out? No, he needed his wits about him. Max lit a cigarette and waited, tapping his foot. It was nearly eight o’clock. Maybe Southdown buses had stopped running. No, there it was at last, a lumbering green shape appearing out of the mist.
The bus creaked its way along the clifftop. Max sat on the top deck and could see nothing on either side of him, but the knowledge that there was a sheer drop on his left didn’t make him feel comfortable exactly.
‘Do they stop the buses if the fog gets too thick?’ he asked the conductor.
‘No,’ said the man, sounding shocked. ‘Sometimes we don’t run the double-deckers if the wind’s very strong. But this? This is nothing. A sea fret, that’s all.’
And it was true that the mist had almost vanished by the time they reached Brighton. The bus stopped on the seafront and Max turned towards Kemp Town, the air clearing as he got further inland. He walked past Mrs M’s house, refusing to indulge in the nostalgia game any more. The only thing that mattered now was finding Ruby.
Emma was putting the children to bed but Edgar greeted him warmly and offered tea or ‘something stronger’. Max asked for coffee, feeling virtuous at resisting spirits for a second time. ‘I think I’ve got some somewhere,’ said Edgar, opening cupboards in a rather helpless way. What was it with English people and coffee? How hard would it be to keep a pot on the hob? Mind you, A
merican coffee was even worse. Max thought wistfully of drinking espresso in Italy, dense black with a golden swirl of cream. Edgar eventually found a pot of instant coffee which, from the way he was digging at it with a spoon, hadn’t been used for some time. Oh well, it was better than nothing.
It was the first time that Max had seen Edgar in his domestic setting. It suited him, the kitchen table still strewn with the remains of a family supper, the sitting room with the playpen and children’s toys on the floor. Edgar was born to be a family man, thought Max. He had an uneasy feeling that he himself was most at home in hotels or boarding houses, places where he could spend a few days and then move on. In variety, Sunday was changeover day, all the pros moving around the country, from one theatre to another. There were places, like the tea room on Crewe railway station, where you could always be sure of bumping into someone you knew. “What are your digs like?’ ‘Not too bad, we had bedbugs in Rochdale.’ ‘That’s nothing, I had fleas in my dressing room at Great Yarmouth.’
Emma came downstairs when they moved into the sitting room. Edgar had made her a cup of tea and she took it gratefully.
‘If I have to read one more chapter of What Katy Bloody Well Did,’ she said, ‘I’ll go mad. She’s such an insufferable girl too. After she becomes good, that is. She’s all right when she’s a rebel in the beginning.’
‘I read The Hobbit to my children,’ said Max. ‘It’s a very strange book. Not a single woman character. It would never run on Broadway.’
‘I can’t imagine you reading to your children,’ said Edgar.
‘Edgar’s very good at it,’ said Emma. ‘Better than me. He does all the voices.’
‘Clearly you have hidden theatrical talents,’ said Max. ‘But it’s one of my children that I’ve come to talk about.’
He told them about Ruby’s dates with Bobby and showed them the letter.
‘It’s her handwriting,’ said Edgar immediately.
‘I know,’ said Max, ‘and it sounds like her too. That old line about hoping they’ll still be friends. She’s obviously hoping that she’ll never see him again. Bobby was astounded. I don’t think he’s ever been dumped before.’
‘The other girls all wrote letters too,’ said Emma. ‘Rhonda, Louise and Sara.’
‘Exactly,’ said Max.
‘She doesn’t say she’s going away though,’ said Edgar. ‘All the other letters do. Rhonda said she was going to London, Louise to the Caribbean. Sara said that she was going off with her boyfriend. What was his name? Peanuts.’
‘Bobby obviously assumes that Ruby’s gone off with the new man,’ said Max, ‘and I suppose it could be true. You’ve only found her shoes, after all. They could just be misdirection.’
‘Or this could be misdirection,’ said Emma, pointing at the letter.
‘That’s true. It could.’
‘I think we have to assume that Ruby’s been abducted,’ said Edgar. ‘No one’s heard from her since Friday and she’s missed work, which isn’t like her. Then we find her shoes in the tunnel. We have to take this very seriously. A girl has been killed, after all.’ His words had a sobering effect on all three of them. On the way there, Max had almost persuaded himself that Ruby had performed a skilful vanishing trick, that she was in the South of France with her new man, laughing at their gullibility. Now he felt that he was the dupe, the stooge.
A girl has been killed, after all.
Twenty-Four
The article appeared in Friday’s Evening Argus.
Emma Stephens, the wife of Superintendent Edgar Stephens of the Brighton Police, is never happier than when in her kitchen cooking up a batch of cakes for her children Marianne (8), Sophie (6) and Baby Jonathan (10 months).
‘Edgar works so hard,’ said Emma, speaking from her sunny Kemp Town home. ‘I always have a hot meal waiting when he comes in. He loves my cakes too. Chocolate’s his favourite.’
Emma knows something about the pressures of working in the police force. Before her marriage she was a policewoman, one of the first woman detective sergeants in the country. Now she provides a listening ear when husband Edgar talks about his cases.
‘Edgar’s very discreet,’ says Emma. ‘He’d never tell me anything confidential but sometimes it does help just to talk something through. And, having been in the force, I do understand some of the issues.’
In Emma’s view marriage is a ‘partnership’ and she and her husband share domestic chores as well as spending as much time as possible with their children. ‘Edgar’s a wonderful father,’ says Emma. ‘He loves reading to the girls and playing games with them. And he dotes on the baby.’ She does admit, though, that Superintendent Stephens is ‘not much of a cook’. And he certainly can’t make chocolate cake!
Emma, thirty-five, is the daughter of businessman Archie Holmes and his ex-socialite wife, Sybil, both of Roedean Drive. Emma attended Roedean School where she is remembered for her skills in debating and public speaking. To relax, Emma likes to read mystery novels and to take baby Jonathan for walks by the sea or in Queen’s Park.
‘I usually visit Queen’s Park before picking the girls up from school,’ says Emma. ‘Johnny loves feeding the ducks.’
Little do the ducks know that they are being fed breadcrumbs by an ex-detective!
Edgar always received an early copy of the Argus at work and he rang Emma as soon as it appeared on his desk. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’
‘It’s so embarrassing,’ said Emma, with truth. She had been cringing all morning about ‘never happier than when in the kitchen’ and ‘I always have a hot meal waiting’.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sam had said when she rang earlier, ‘the editor changed it to make it sound “more wholesome”. And the bloody sub put quote marks round “partnership”. I’d put in much more about your work as a detective but the ed just blue-pencilled it.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Emma. ‘At least he left the bit about Queen’s Park.’
‘I thought you hated this sort of thing,’ said Edgar.
‘I do. It was Sam’s idea.’
‘Nice picture of you.’
It was rather a flattering photograph, Emma smiling sweetly, holding a saucepan and looking saintly. There was another picture of her with the children; Marianne sitting like an angel, her golden hair loose about her face, Sophie with her eyes shut and Jonathan in mid howl.
‘They were determined to go on about the cooking,’ said Emma. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever made you chocolate cake in my life.’
‘Well, I’ll expect one tonight,’ said Edgar, ‘as well as a hot meal and a nice chat about work.’ He was laughing but Emma thought that he still sounded rather put out. Perhaps he thought that the article wasn’t the right sort of publicity for a superintendent.
‘How’s the case going?’ she asked. ‘Did you find anything else in the smugglers’ tunnels?’
‘There are signs that people have been in some of them, a few cigarette butts and some empty bottles. That sort of thing. But local kids sneak in sometimes so they might not have anything to do with the kidnapper. No other real clues. I was hoping the abductor might try to make contact after all the publicity about Ruby.’
But you don’t know what bait to use, thought Emma.
‘Telephone for Connolly.’
‘For me?’
Meg wasn’t in the habit of getting telephone calls. Her parents didn’t own a phone and, when calls came through at work, they were almost always for the DI. She approached cautiously, half expecting a practical joke from O’Neill and Barker. On April Fool’s Day they’d had her going round the station telling people that someone called I. P. Knightly was on the phone.
‘This is WPC Connolly.’
‘Is that Meg? I couldn’t remember your surname. I just asked for the tall policewoman.’
It was Isabel, the blonde Bobby Soxer from outside the Ritz.
‘That’s me,’ said Meg. ‘What is it?’ She’d given the girls the number of the station
and told them to call if they had any information for her. She never expected it to happen though.
‘You remember the man?’ Isabel was saying. ‘The one who told Rhonda that she should be a model? Well, I think I saw him again.’
‘You think you saw him? Where?’
‘Here,’ said Isabel, as if Meg would instantly know where that was. ‘Outside my house.’
Meg grabbed a piece of paper. ‘What’s your address?’
‘Forty-five Bletchley Road, Dollis Hill.’
‘Dollis Hill. Where’s that?’
‘It’s near Willesden Green,’ said Isabel, as if this explained everything.
‘And you saw this man outside your house? How did you recognise him?’
‘Well, I didn’t at first. But I knew I knew him from somewhere. I’ve seen him here a few times, walking up and down the road, like he was lost. Then, this morning, when I was leaving to go to school, he was sitting at the bus stop outside the house. And I realised where I’d seen him before.’
‘Did he talk to you?’
‘No. But he raised his hat and sort of smiled.’
‘Where are you now? Why aren’t you in school?’
‘School’s finished,’ said Isabel. Looking at the clock on the wall, Meg was surprised to see that it was three-forty-five. School finishes so early but, when you’re there, it seems as if the day goes on for ever.
‘Are you at home?’
‘In the phone box at the end of the street.’
‘Well, go home and don’t go out again on your own. Are you still skiving off to go to the Ritz?’
‘No. Bobby’s gone away for a few days. Pat the doorman says he’s in Sussex. Maybe he’s in Brighton.’
‘Look, Isabel. Izzy. This is important. Don’t leave the house on your own. Do you walk to school by yourself?’
Now You See Them Page 18
