‘Then you have between now and nine-thirty to do something for me,’ said Coffin, looking at the clock.
‘Oh yes?’
‘I want you to take a child for a walk.’
‘Just me?’
‘Well, you’d better take his mother too. To tell you the truth, I don’t suppose she’d let him out of her sight just now.’
‘We won’t have a crowd following us, will we?’
‘I’ll fix that,’ said Coffin, looking out of the window. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll have to walk far. He’s only small and the doctor who examined him last night says there’s no sign he’s been walking around a lot. Feet weren’t bruised or sore or anything like that … I’ll give you the medical report, you’d better read it before you meet him.’ He tossed it over and Joan caught it. ‘You were a nurse before you came into the Force, weren’t you?’ She nodded. ‘It’ll mean more to you, then. Also it might help with the boy. Watch him all you can. See what you make of him. Watch the mother, too.’
‘What?’
‘Watch the mother,’ said Coffin, not amplifying the statement.
‘You think she’s important?’
‘I think she may be everything,’ he said.
‘Will you be there?’
‘No.’ He got up, ending the interview. ‘Not exactly there, but around.’
‘What do you think he meant about the mother?’ Joan Eames said to Sergeant Parr downstairs as she gathered up her things. She occasionally found it possible to strike up a human relationship with him, which was not the way she felt about Inspector Dove.
‘Oh, I dunno. He’s a bit of an old joss at the moment. I suppose mothers are always important.’
‘Was your mother important?’
‘Rather. Still is. She’s looking out for a good girl for me to marry.’ He grinned at her.
Joan nodded. She liked him; she had a strong idea she could like him rather a lot, but she had no idea how he felt about her. As Tony Young might have put it, his signals to her were contradictory.
‘Well, I’m going out to see this boy and his mother and together we’re going to see if he will take us to the place where he hid.’
‘Looks a good idea,’ said Parr. ‘He ought to know.’
‘You’re not too well acquainted with children, are you?’ said Joan, preparing to depart. ‘You’re an only child, I should think?’
‘Yes, I am. How did you know?’
Joan laughed. ‘Perhaps it’s the way you talk about your mother,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘Anyway, I’ll tell you. The boy ought to know, but will he say?’
Mrs Anderson had been told to expect Joan Eames and was waiting for her. The front door swung open as soon as Joan appeared.
The two women stared at each other. ‘I thought you’d be older,’ said Mrs Anderson.
‘I’m older than I look. Can I come in?’
For answer, Mrs Anderson held the door open wider and stood aside, but she didn’t say anything.
Joan looked at her with sympathy. ‘You look tired,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid the house is very untidy,’ said the woman defensively. ‘I haven’t been able to give my mind to it.’
‘I should think not.’
In fect the hall where they stood was not untidy, but it was undusted and the flowers on the small round table where the telephone stood were dead. They had been dead for days.
‘Is the boy ready?’ asked Joan.
‘Yes, I’ll get him.’ She left Joan standing in the hall and went into a room at the end of it.
Joan looked around while she waited. Before disaster struck the household it had been a neat and well-decorated hall, the home of people who enjoyed living there. The furnishings were not expensive (you didn’t live in this district if you could afford to move) but they were carefully chosen. On the other hand, the taste it displayed was commonplace and unimaginative. It could have been duplicated twenty times up and down Saxe-Coburg Street. The only exceptional thing was the telephone; working-class households in Saxe-Coburg Street didn’t have telephones.
Mrs Anderson came back, holding her son by the hand.
‘We have to have the telephone,’ she said, seeing Joan’s gaze. ‘It’s my husband’s work. At the docks. They have to be able to let him know.’ She didn’t specify what, possibly she did not know. Men around here were not talkative about their work at home.
‘Oh yes.’ Joan was looking at the boy. He was wearing a tweed coat, a cap and thick socks up to his knees. ‘Isn’t he a little wrapped up for such a warm day?’
‘He’s a delicate boy; he needs to be wrapped up; he’s had a shock.’
‘I thought the doctor said he was all right.’
‘He’s still had a shock. Haven’t you, baby boy?’ Baby boy gave his mother a blank, possibly hostile stare. Her hands shook as she adjusted his coat.
If he hasn’t had a shock, you have, thought Joan Eames. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes, come along, Baby.’
Baby was three and could walk and talk, but he wasn’t doing either. His mother had picked him up in her arms.
‘I should let him walk,’ said Joan.
‘Oh no, no. He’d be frightened.’
‘He has to walk. He can’t show us where to go unless he walks. Talk to him. Ask him to show us where he was hiding.’
‘I’ve asked him that and he doesn’t answer.’
‘Yes, but he might be able to show us. Ask him to lead the way. Go on, put him down and ask him to do that.’
Mrs Anderson seemed to take a decision. She set the boy down. ‘Come on, darling,’ she said. ‘Show us where Belle is.’
Something in her voice got across to Joan Eames. She doesn’t mind so much about Belle, she thought. She’s got back the one she likes best.
For a moment Joan was angry, then she looked at the woman’s face and realized that any partiality Mrs Anderson felt was so deep rooted, so built into her character that she herself was unconscious of it. She was just a woman who thought boys were best.
‘Bring him along,’ said Joan gently.
Together they stepped out into the street. It was still early in the day and the street was not crowded. Far from it, in fect it was so empty of life that Joan suspected the hand of her boss, John Coffin, of having cleared it. At the end of the road there was a car and she thought she could see him sitting in it. So they were to be watched on their walk. She felt a little easier. Of course, it couldn’t be dangerous, this walk of theirs, but it was nice to know someone was there.
‘Show us where you came from,’ said Joan to the boy. ‘Show us the way. A clever boy like you can do that.’
He looked at her, as if amused, but did not move.
‘Oh, come on, the way to Belle. Sister Belle?’
‘She’s not his sister,’ said the woman suddenly, harshly. ‘Not a full sister, that is. You shouldn’t say she is.’
‘I thought she was.’
‘She’s not my husband’s child. She was born before I married him. He took her on. He’s been very good.’
So that’s why you don’t like her, thought Joan. ‘Should you say it in front of him?’ she said, nodding towards the boy. ‘He may not like it.’
‘Sister,’ said the boy speaking for the first time in a rough little voice, as if he hadn’t used it for a long time. ‘Sister,’ he said again.
‘Well, that’s what he thinks,’ said Joan. ‘Show us the way then, love.’
He started forward confidently and the two women followed. Their little party, followed at a discreet distance by the police car, went down the road, turned a corner and headed towards the river. Ahead of them was a long street with the school on one side and the trees of a small park on the other. Joan thought maybe he was leading them towards the school. Their pace quickened.
‘He’s taking us to the park, you know,’ said his mother. ‘He always likes to go to the park.’
‘Perhaps his sister is there. Perhaps that’s where
he hid, it’s reasonable.’
‘It was all searched,’ said Mrs Anderson. Mutely Joan admitted the improbability of any hiding place in the park being overlooked.
They stood at the park gate and looked at the neat paths, the flower-beds and the trim green grass lawns. There was a pool in one corner and at the opposite one the children’s playground.
‘Swings?’ said the boy hopefully, stepping out briskly towards the playground.
‘No, no swings,’ said Joan Eames severely. ‘Belle! Belle! Show us where you were hiding when you stayed away from Mummy.’
‘Ask him about the little house,’ said his mother. ‘That’s what he said: that he was in a little house.’
‘All right,’ said Joan. ‘Show us the little house. Where is it?’
Slowly their party set off again. This time, after hesitating at the gate, they walked back the way they had come. Very soon they had reached the main road and were heading down Saxe-Coburg Street.
This time, except for traffic, nothing very positive stretched ahead of them. It seemed as though they might walk on for ever.
‘Is he likely to have walked far from home?’ asked Joan. ‘Can he walk much distance?’
‘He’s strong for his age. I should think he could walk quite a long way if he had to.’
‘He’d have been noticed, wouldn’t he, if he’d come far on his own?’
‘I think so. But you can’t be sure,’ said his mother. Then she said: ‘He likes walking.’
‘I’m beginning to notice that.’ He liked the traffic too, and Joan thought he was really strolling along, enjoying it without much more in his head. ‘He can’t have come this way,’ she said. They stopped. Gently she said again to the child: ‘Take us to the little house where you were with Belle. Please do that.’
He was silent, evidently considering, and then he took Joan Eames’s hand and started off.
‘He doesn’t talk much, does he?’
‘He does sometimes. When he wants to.’
They turned off the main road again down a side street. Behind them as before came the attendant police car. She was very conscious of this following and she wondered if the Andersons were too. Mrs Anderson must have been because she continually looked back over her shoulder. As for the boy, he, although silent, gave every sign of being so sharp and bright that Joan quite expected him to stop and ask for a lift.
The geography of this district was simple. There were two wide roads, Upper Dock Road and Saxe-Coburg Street, down which traffic poured and these were bisected at intervals by lesser side roads, mainly residential but with the occasional factory and office block. None of it was new and none of it much pleasure to the eye. It was like a grid. Or a child’s game. All you had to do was to keep walking round and round the squares and you got ‘home’.
Mrs Anderson saw this before Joan did. ‘Know what?’ she said. ‘He’s taking us back home.’
‘Oh blast.’ Joan Eames knelt down and got her face on a level with the small flushed one. (In spite of what his mother said, he was too well wrapped up.)
‘The place where you hid?’ she said hopefully. Take us there.’
‘This isn’t really a good place to stop,’ fussed Mrs Anderson. Joan thought how she hated anyone coming between her and her son, even to ask a question.
‘I want to see if he understands me.’
The police car also drew up and stopped. Coffin got out. ‘No good?’ he asked sympathetically. ‘Doesn’t he understand?’
‘Of course he understands,’ said his mother.
‘Why doesn’t he do something about it then?’
The women were silent, for once united. Their eyes met. Speechlessly they agreed that Coffin didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘He is trying,’ said Joan Eames. ‘Anyone can see he’s trying.’ She took his hand.
‘It was a bad idea,’ said Coffin gloomily. ‘And yet, there it is, he knows, he’s the only one who does. He ought to be able to tell us.’
With a radiant smile, the boy came up to him and touched his hand.
‘You see, he is trying,’ said Joan. They were halfway down Riga Street. Behind them was the blank wall of an old factory and in front were houses and a couple of shops. The factory, which looked empty and disused, had once made shoe polish. But its trade had dwindled and died as people seemed to give up cleaning their shoes. Or anyway they gave up cleaning them with Liddell’s Boot and Shoe Polish. This factory had its front on Riga Street and its back on Archangel Street. (There was a strong Russian element in the street names here because the old Muscovite traders had lodged round here centuries ago.) A short cobbled way led into the factory through the high arched entrance under which huge horse-drawn drays had once come and gone.
The little party crossed this cobbled path. Joan looked up at the factory. ‘What about there?’ she said.
‘We searched there,’ said Coffin briefly. ‘Of course.’
He got back into his car and watched them.
The boy was tugging at Joan Eames’s hand. I think we’re getting somewhere,’ she called back.
‘I’m coming,’ she said to the boy. ‘Don’t pull too hard. Little house?’
‘Little house. Little house.’
‘We looked all round here,’ said his mother. ‘Everyone searched.’ She was beginning to look white and haggard. Joan noticed she was beginning to put everything connected with Belle into the past tense.
‘I think we have to try this,’ said Joan. She was looking around her. They were passing a terrace of small houses, built of yellowing brick which soot and fog had darkened. Was one of these ‘the little house’? It didn’t seem likely, somehow. They were certainly small enough, but no smaller than the boy’s own home and therefore probably just seemed normal, what a home should be, to him. And anyway, he was small himself and houses looked bigger then, didn’t they? No, something in the phrase ‘little house’ suggested something special, something childlike.
Now they had passed houses and were coming up to two or three shops. She knew them and sometimes bought groceries here on her way home from work. She could see the grocery shop and the chemist shop next door, with its window full of aspirin and lipstick. Joan often wished the chemist shop was something like an American drug store and that you could get something to drink there. She could drink some coffee this minute. The third shop was a general store that sold everything the chemist and the grocer had forgotten to stock and one or two things they wouldn’t have touched at any price. One window was full of magazines and comics, including a row of paperbacks which were hardly kids’ stuff. It was a double-fronted shop and the farther window seemed to interest the child. He led the two women right up to it.
Joan Eames looked at it blankly, seeing a jumble of cheap toys.
‘Lots of toys there,’ she said.
‘Little house,’ he said, confidently pointing. ‘Little house.’ He gave her that same brilliant smile he had given to Coffin and which she already saw as having some special meaning.
She looked at rows of plastic money-boxes shaped into miniature houses with chimneys and window-boxes and a slot in the roof to put the money in.
‘Yes, a little house. Lots of little houses,’ she said sadly. She patted his head. ‘Clever boy.’
She turned to his mother. ‘Better get him home. This is over, I think.’
Silently they started to walk off. Joan Eames still had the boy’s hand and she felt him dragging.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back, into the shop.’ They went back.
‘Well, he did try,’ she said to his mother. ‘I’d like to buy him a little house.’
‘I’d rather have a horse,’ said the boy very clearly and suddenly.
Joan looked down, surprised. ‘So you can talk.’
‘When he wants,’ put in his mother.
If you didn’t talk for him, he might talk more, thought Joan Eames.
Watch the mother, John Coffin had said to
her. Well, she had watched the mother. As a result of watching the mother she had come to certain conclusions. There were two. Firstly that the mother did not much love her daughter who was missing; secondly that she too much loved her son. She thought the son knew this, and she suspected that the sister had known too.
‘Hello, Mr Plowman,’ she said to the man behind the counter. ‘Not busy today?’
‘Not so busy,’ he said. Joan couldn’t tell if he was pleased or displeased by the peace of his shop; you could never read his expression easily behind his big thick spectacles.
‘Seen any flying saucers lately?’
‘No.’ He was polite, level voiced.
‘I want a toy for this young boy.’
‘Oh yes, I know him.’
Jim was staring up at him. No expression much there either.
‘He wants a toy horse.’
‘A little horse,’ said Jim, in an adult manner.
‘Oh yes, I have some round the back. Tony,’ he called, ‘bring out that box of little wooden horses that came in yesterday.’
‘Right.’ Tony Young came in through the door at the back of the shop, staggering slightly because the box was awkwardly big and he was only a small slight boy.
‘Hello,’ he said, looking at them through his dark spectacles, which rendered him, like his employer, expressionless and calm. The two faces, Tony’s and Plowman’s, seemed for a moment to mirror each other.
Chapter Twelve
‘Do you know Tony Young?’ asked Mrs Anderson in surprise.
‘Oh yes.’ Joan Eames didn’t find it necessary to say that a neat little biography of Tony had been fed her by Inspector Dove and that she had had him pointed out to her as he left the police station. ‘We haven’t been introduced, but I know him. Does he always work in that shop?’
‘On and off. Lately anyway. He’s always around.’
‘I’ve met Mr Plowman.’ Once again, Joan did not find it necessary to explain that they had met professionally. They had suspected John Plowman of peddling pornography among his paperbacks and Joan had been part of the team that had gone around investigating. Her part had been small, just to walk in and out of the shop on two occasions and buy some books. Perhaps it had just been a dirty story about John Plowman, because nothing was ever found as far as Joan Eames knew. She would have been the first to admit however that she didn’t know everything and that there might be more tucked away in the file about John Plowman than she knew. She knew there was a file.
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