Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Can I quote you on that?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Don’t put us name in t’paper,’ Craig’s mother said. ‘We’ve got some sort of appeal coming up. Governors or summat. I don’t want to muck up his chances wi’ that, do I? Though they’re all in Murgatroyd’s bloody pocket, as far as I can see.’

  And with that Laura had to be content. When she got back to the office she found Ted Grant in unusually ebullient form when she reported back to him on her trip.

  ‘Excellent,’ he said, after she’d sketched in her interview with the head teacher and the promise of more from David Murgatroyd. ‘That should give these bloody naysayers in Bradfield summat to think about. It’s always the same in this country. You get someone who makes a success of their life, who’s full of good ideas, and there’s always some bleeding heart making a bloody commotion about how whatever it is can’t possibly work, won’t be good for us if it does, offends “’ealth and safety”, or could be trampling on someone’s bloody human rights. It’s no wonder we never make any progress. There’s too many begrudgers trying to maintain the status quo. If the only objection’s coming from the mothers of a couple of little tearaways, there can’t be much wrong, can there?’

  ‘It might be a tad soon to write your editorial,’ Laura suggested mildly. ‘Let me interview the man first. And talk to this group that’s trying to get the expelled kids reinstated. I got a number to call from the community centre.’

  ‘Get that fixed up pronto,’ Ted said. ‘We can go with your stuff at the end of the week, maybe. We’ve a good story from Bob Baker which will run for a day or so anyway. This woman who’s vanished turns out to be a right little slapper, according to her friends and neighbours.’

  Laura drew a sharp breath.

  ‘Her family will love us for that,’ she said. ‘Has Bob Baker talked to the police about it?’

  ‘I don’t need their permission to run some interviews with her mates,’ Grant said, his colour rising, a warning to Laura that she had once again gone too far for her irascible boss. ‘You should remember what I pay you for,’ he bellowed suddenly. ‘And it’s not for representing your bloody boyfriend at editorial conferences. Just think about that.’

  ‘Fine,’ Laura snapped. ‘I’ll fix an appointment with Murgatroyd, then.’

  ‘And make it snappy. You can’t have the whole week for this school stuff, you know. In fact, I wonder now whether it won’t just encourage the dinosaurs up at Sutton Park. Maybe the whole bloody thing’s a mistake.’

  Laura turned on her heel without any more argument. She knew from long experience that Ted Grant reacted badly to anything he regarded as contradiction, and she had too many other things on her mind to rush into a conflict which she knew she could not win. But on her way back to her own desk she stopped behind Bob Baker, who was pounding his computer keyboard as if he had a hot tip on the date of the Apocalypse.

  ‘What did Karen Bastable do to you?’ she asked, as she took in the viciousness of the character assassination which Baker seemed to have gleaned from her anonymous ‘friends’ in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Well, it confirms what I said from the off,’ Baker said. ‘Hubby had plenty of reason to see her off, judging by what her mates say.’

  ‘You need to watch out for the libel lawyers,’ Laura said.

  ‘You can’t libel the dead,’ Baker said. ‘And I reckon this girlie’s dead and buried. Only question is where, and how long it’s going to take DCI Plod to find her.’

  ‘So tell her kids she’s a slag, why don’t you? You’re on the wrong paper, Bob. You should be down in London with the Globe.’

  ‘And you’d do well on the Lady’s Home Journal,’ Baker came back quickly. ‘They’d give you time off when you’re on the rag. Get out of my hair, will you? You wouldn’t recognise a good story if it jumped up and hit you between the eyes.’

  Laura turned away, her face flushed, and her eyes suddenly filling with tears. She hurried to the cloakroom where she spent some time gazing at herself in the mirror. If she had wanted any confirmation that the pregnancy test had been only too accurate she knew that her emotional reaction provided it. But as she combed her hair, repaired her make-up and tried to compose herself enough to make it back to her desk, she knew that her problems were only just beginning.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sergeant Kevin Mower had found Charlene Brough still in her dressing gown – a frayed woollen affair buttoned up to the neck – rather than the silky negligee they had disturbed her in the last time the police called. He accepted her cursory invitation to follow her into the living room, where she slumped into an armchair. The morning sunlight streaming in through the grubby windows revealed just how pale and washed out she looked as she drew hard on her cigarette and pushed her lank blond hair away from her face.

  ‘What do you want now?’ she asked.

  ‘Boyfriend not here last night, then, Charlene?’ Mower shot back and was rewarded with a scowl.

  ‘He’s buggered off, hasn’t he?’ she said. ‘He couldn’t be doing with all this bother over Karen, could he? When all she’s probably done is gone off for a fling with someone she’s met up in t’forest. She’ll go spare when she finds out what a fuss it’s caused.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’ Mower asked more gently. ‘It’s been three days now since her car was seen abandoned up there. That’s a long time to leave your family without a word.’

  Charlene nodded dumbly and lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one.

  ‘Have you any reason to believe that she’s run off with anyone?’ Mower persisted. ‘Anyone she talked about? Anyone she thought was special, the way you did with Paul Logan?’

  Charlene shook her head, and glanced away to hide the tears in her eyes.

  ‘Terry’s a bit of a boring beggar, and seriously weird with his politics, but she worshipped her kids,’ she said very quietly. ‘She’d not have gone off and left them without a word. She wanted a bit of fun, OK? Who doesn’t? But she never said owt to me about it being any more than that.’

  ‘Right,’ Mower said. ‘So I want you to look at some photographs which we took off her mobile phone…’

  ‘You’ve got her mobile?’ Charlene broke in, obviously surprised.

  ‘She left it in the car,’ Mower said.

  ‘She’d never have done that normal, like,’ Charlene said. ‘She were wedded to that bloody mobile. She’d just got a new one, all singing, all dancing, pictures, music, the lot. I thought it were right daft myself. Who wants a phone to do all that stuff? But she did. She bloody loved it.’

  ‘D’you know if she ever used it to contact anyone she’d met up there?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Charlene said. ‘The whole point was you didn’t know anyone. No names, no numbers, nowt. I only met Paul properly because he followed us home.’

  ‘But Karen never left the forest in her own car that night, as far as we can tell, so that’s not what happened to her,’ Mower said. ‘She’s either still up there or left in someone else’s vehicle, which is exactly why we need to find out who was there. Either way, she’s probably come to some harm. Someone must have seen her at the end of the session. I want you to look at the photographs she took that night when she went up to the forest on her own, perhaps because she was a bit nervous.’ Mower pulled his sheaf of enlarged pictures out and handed them to Charlene. ‘Take a good look and see if there’s anyone there you’ve seen before, or whether you can link any of the people in the pictures to the cars. Anything at all you can think of.’

  Charlene thumbed her way through the photographs slowly without saying anything and then went back to the beginning and started again.

  ‘A couple of the cars look familiar. They’ve been there before,’ she said, pointing to the blurred images of a couple of vehicles parked under the trees. ‘But I don’t know who they belonged to. Some of the blokes take good care they’re not going to be recognised, use masks and that – look, th
ere, that one with the funny Tony Blair mask. He’s there most times. A right goer he is, too. I think he drives a Volvo, as it happens, but that’s not in t’pictures, is it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have noticed any registration numbers?’

  Charlene looked at him as if he was an idiot.

  ‘Give over,’ she said. ‘There’s one or two I could describe with their pants down, but I don’t suppose that’s any good to you. There’s one bloke hung…’

  ‘Yes, right,’ Mower said quickly. ‘Unless you can describe his face…?’ But Charlene shook her head with a faint grin and turned back to the photographs. But in the end she shrugged and handed them back to Mower.

  ‘There’s nowt there I can help you with,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I really am. I liked Karen. She doesn’t deserve summat like this happening to her. Does Terry know why she went up there?’

  Mower glanced at his watch.

  ‘Well, if he didn’t already, he should do by now,’ he said. ‘My boss was going to tell him this morning.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Charlene said with a shudder. ‘I don’t think I want to be around when he finds out about all that. He’s bound to blame me and he can be a violent beggar when he chooses. I’ll give Paul a bell and see if I can stay with him for a while.’

  ‘He’s not married, then?’

  ‘Separated,’ Charlene said. ‘And I might as well be, for all I see of my husband, with all his long-distance trips.’

  ‘Let us know where you’re going,’ Mower said. ‘We may need to talk to you again. There’s just one more thing. The ads in the Gazette telling you when the meet was to take place. We’ve had them traced and the paper’s come up with half a dozen, at intervals of a couple of weeks. Did the wording ever vary?’

  ‘Not as far as I can remember,’ Charlene said. ‘A lad at work I was joshing around with one day showed me one first off. He’d been up there once or twice and thought it were a right laugh. It sounded as if it were worth a go.’

  ‘Who was this lad?’ Mower said quickly.

  ‘John, he were called. I can’t recall his last name. He were only casual. He left about six months ago any road, went to live in Birmingham, I think. But he introduced us, and then I took Karen later.’

  ‘But no names.’

  ‘Not proper names, no,’ she said, glancing away. ‘Just silly stuff, like Diamond Lil, and Mean Machine – he were, too. I didn’t like him much. He were too rough for my taste.’

  ‘OK, OK, I get the picture,’ Mower said, slightly wearily. ‘We’ll talk to your work people about John who went to Birmingham. In the meantime, keep in touch, you and Paul. We need to trace some of these people and you’re the only contact we’ve got.’

  Back at police HQ he met DCI Michael Thackeray coming out of the CID office looking grim.

  ‘How did you get on with Bastable, guv?’ he asked.

  ‘He took it relatively calmly,’ Thackeray said. ‘As if it was no more than he expected, I’d say. Or as if he’d known why she went up to the forest all along. He swears he had no idea, of course, but I’m not sure I believe him. What about you?’ Mower recounted the gist of his inconclusive interview with Charlene Brough as he made his way to his desk. Thackeray followed and picked up a copy of that afternoon’s Gazette from a table.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked. ‘Our friend Bob Baker’s really excelled himself on this one.’ Mower took the paper and quickly read through the front page story.

  ‘As nasty a bit of character assassination as I’ve seen for a long time,’ he said. ‘Just as well you spoke to Bastable when you did, before he saw the Gazette.’

  Thackeray read over his shoulder in silence for a moment.

  ‘He may have done us a favour if it infuriates her husband as much as it’s likely to do,’ he said at length. ‘Anything which rattles him is all to the good. That’s the point at which he’ll do something stupid.’

  ‘You still reckon it was him?’

  ‘It’s usually the husband, isn’t it?’ Thackeray said. ‘It’s just as well all these so-called friends and neighbours stayed anonymous, though. Bastable would be round kicking their doors down if he knew who they were.’

  Mower finished reading Baker’s story and shrugged.

  ‘There’s not really anything there for us to follow up directly, is there? And you can be certain Bob Baker won’t tell us who his informants are – if they’re not all figments of his imagination, anyway. I can just imagine Ted Grant self-righteously protecting his sources.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to put any credence in Baker’s sources, anyway,’ Thackeray said. ‘It gives us a good reason for another house-to-house up on the Heights, though. And not too carefully concealed from the husband, either. Get Nasreem Mirza up there with some other female officers. See if they can flush out the same sort of gossip about Karen and her friend, Charlene, and what they’ve been getting up to in their spare time. It looks as if some of it was fairly general knowledge amongst some of the women. They say the husband’s always the last to know.’

  ‘Until some good friend decides to enlighten him,’ Mower said. ‘I wonder if someone actually did that in this case. Certainly worth asking. That could have been the catalyst that sparked him off.’

  ‘Anything from forensics?’ Thackeray asked.

  ‘Nothing on the photographs yet, but Bastable’s shoes don’t fit the prints they found up there, I’m afraid. If someone was standing in the shadows watching what was going on, it wasn’t him.’

  ‘We’re going to look very stupid if this wretched woman turns up safe and well and shacked up with some boyfriend in Skegness or Blackpool,’ Thackeray said morosely.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely, guv,’ Mower said. ‘The whole thing’s got a nasty smell about it.’

  ‘Well, leave it with forensics for now,’ Thackeray said. ‘They may come up with something. In the meantime, get a team up there to talk to the friends and neighbours. Karen Bastable’s a striking-looking woman with that red hair. I’ve no doubt her comings and goings were noted by the local gossips with nothing better to do.’

  ‘They’re practically breathing down each others’ necks on that new estate,’ Mower said. ‘It must be almost impossible to have any sort of a private life.’

  ‘Who has a private life these days?’ Thackeray asked himself as much as Mower. ‘The whole concept’s obsolete.’

  Laura had tried several times to follow David Murgatroyd’s advice and contact his assistant to make an appointment, but so far without success. She knew Ted Grant wanted to run her feature before the end of the week and the deadline was getting tight. But messages left on the Sibden House answerphone had so far elicited no response and she had failed to track Sanderson down at Murgatroyd’s London HQ. When a receptionist advised disdainfully that she should try his mobile phone and Laura had asked for the number, she had refused to divulge it, saying she was forbidden to hand out numbers to anyone at all.

  Laura sighed, and was wondering whether to try her luck at Sibden House in person again, when her phone rang and she unexpectedly found herself connected to Debbie Stapleton, the head of Sutton Park School.

  ‘I just thought you’d like to know,’ she said, her voice shaking slightly. ‘It’s this afternoon that the council has decided to bring David Murgatroyd and his cohorts to look round the school after we finish at three-thirty. All at very short notice. I had no idea until an hour ago. But as soon as the news got out, some of the staff and governors seem to have organised some sort of demonstration outside the gates. I guess the kids will get wind of it, and maybe even some parents, so we could have a bit of a confrontation going on. I thought the Gazette would like to know.’

  ‘I’m sure we would,’ Laura said, glancing towards the editor’s glassed-off cubicle at the other side of the newsroom and meeting his less than friendly eye for a moment. ‘I’ll make sure someone comes down with a photographer. Thanks very much, Debbie. I take it you’re not going to be at the
demo yourself.’ The head teacher laughed but without much mirth in the sound.

  ‘I’m still planning to apply for my own job if this thing goes ahead, though I don’t have high hopes,’ she said. ‘I don’t think waving a placard at the school gates would do me much good, though, do you? I’ll have to be there to show them round with a smile on my face.’

  ‘Hard luck,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll see if I can get there myself. I’ve had a half-promise of an interview with Sir David, so maybe I can catch him and firm it up.’

  By half past three, with Ted Grant’s grumpy acquiescence, Laura found herself outside the gates of Sutton Park School, where a handful of people had already assembled although school had clearly not yet finished for the day. She introduced herself to one or two of the demonstrators and was pushed in the direction of a stocky, dark-haired man in working clothes, who turned out to be the parent governor, Steve O’Mara, the man her grandmother had recommended she speak to.

  ‘You’re Joyce’s granddaughter?’ he asked, revealing a slight Irish brogue. ‘She’s a top lady, is your grandmother. I knew her when she was still a councillor.’

  ‘She’d still like to be,’ Laura said. ‘It’s only her arthritis slows her down.’

  ‘She’s still in touch, sharp as a knife,’ O’Mara said. ‘She’s been very helpful with this bloody hijacker Murgatroyd.’

  ‘I went to the academy in Leeds this morning,’ Laura said. ‘It seems to me that they achieve what they achieve simply by keeping out the most difficult children.’

  ‘While our Debbie has been pushing up the results without keeping anyone out,’ O’Mara said. ‘You’ll never crack the problems on the estates if you don’t tackle the really difficult kids. I know. I live on the Heights. It’ll be a bloody tragedy for Wuthering if Debbie loses her job.’