by Alan Beechey
“Were there any activities at the school?”
“Only the regular meeting of the computer club. Tina’s not a member and she wasn’t there.”
“How about irregular activities? Any pre-Christmas sporting events? Carol singing?”
“Nothing.”
“And we know Tina didn’t hang out with her friends during that time. All the girls I spoke to said she left as soon as school ended and they hadn’t seen her since. I couldn’t find anyone who could think of a reason why she should run away.”
“Me neither. Although one of the girls I interviewed said she seemed withdrawn, thoughtful. Apparently she’s usually something of a chatterbox. A bit full of herself.”
“She’s not quite fourteen,” Effie mused. “Give her a year and she’ll find herself taking a back pew to the boys in her class. Any boys in her life, by the way?”
“When I asked if she could have been meeting a boy after school, her friends seemed to think it was rather ludicrous. Tina spent a lot of time at this funny church her parents go to, and she came in for ribbing from her less religious peers.”
“Was there anything happening at the church that evening?”
“I doubt it. The Quarterboys would have known, wouldn’t they? Isn’t he some kind of bigwig?”
“Church secretary, if I remember rightly,” Effie said thoughtfully. Oliver had been out at Plumley during Tina’s missing hours, or somewhat later. Had he said anything about meetings or events?
“Okay, so Tina arrives home at six,” she picked up, remembering her own interview with the Quarterboys the previous day. “She claims to be feeling unwell, doesn’t want any tea, and takes herself off to her bedroom. Mr. Q gets home at seven, looks in on her and has a few brief words. He notices that she’s writing and assumes she’s now doing her homework, so he leaves her alone. At nine-thirty, she calls downstairs to say she’s going to bed. Mother looks in on her at ten-thirty and she seems to be asleep. Next morning, the bird has flown, leaving only a note. When she doesn’t appear at school, Mum and Dad call the cops demanding bloodhounds and search parties. Let’s see that note again.”
Tish passed over a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, which Tina had left on the kitchen table. On it, she had written:
Dear Mum
Don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright.
I just don’t want to disapoint Dad.
Please don’t worry.
Love
Tina
“I wonder what would disappoint Dad?” Tish asked. “Sam and Joan said they had no idea what she meant.”
“From what I hear, Mr. Q. has high standards and expects her to run her life by them. A sneaky ciggie or a glimpse of Playgirl may be enough to plague her conscience for a fortnight.”
“Still, to run away…”
Tish broke off, looking apprehensively at the door to the large room. Casanova, better known as Detective Constable Trevor Stoodby had sidled through and was trying to shed his oversized parka without letting go of a large paper bag.
“Oh, good morning, Ma’am,” he said humbly to Effie.
Her first reaction was to correct the honorific, since it belonged to an officer with a higher rank—preferably female. Her second reaction was to let it stand. Stoodby hung up his parka, and then approached the women, pulling various paper cups, packets, and stirrers from the bag.
“I thought you might like some nice hot coffee, Ma’am,” he whispered, “seeing that it’s a bit nippy out. I brought you some too, Tish. Black, one sugar, right?”
He smiled at Tish hopefully, who snatched away Tina’s note before he could put her coffee cup on it.
“White, no sugar,” she said scornfully. “But there’s no reason why you’d know that.” Stoodby looked downcast.
“Well, I didn’t put the sugar in,” he said contritely, “and there’s milk in those little cartons. But I’ll try to remember in future.” He turned away and drifted toward his desk, muttering “White, no sugar” several times under his breath.
“Trevor,” Effie called. He spun around, delight and apprehension fighting for the right to contort his features.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Yeah, thanks Trev,” Tish added reluctantly. In the battle for Stoodby’s face, relief elbowed delight and apprehension aside and won by a nose.
“Where do you think Tina was during those missing hours?” Effie asked Tish.
“Maybe she was wandering around, afraid to go home? We could walk the route from school to home, ask people on the street if they saw her. It’s largely residential in those areas, a couple of parks, although they wouldn’t be too crowded in this cold weather.”
“Shops? Chip shop? Some place to play video games?”
“Not where she lives, it’s the posher part of town. She’d have to go well out of her way to reach the shops where the kids like to hang out.”
“She had two hours. Maybe she was up the High Street, buying some Christmas prezzies for Mum and Dad? Let’s try some street interviews this afternoon.”
“It’s a shame today’s Saturday, though—there won’t be the same traffic patterns as there would be on a weekday.”
Saturday, thought Effie. She had planned to spend the day with Oliver. “Try it anyway,” she said. “And look out for dog-walkers.”
“Dog-walkers?”
“They often keep to a regular pattern. A dog’s digestive system doesn’t know it’s the weekend. Don’t focus just on Thursday evening—she may have been seen in the area since then. Tina doesn’t seem a particularly worldly child, and I have a hunch that she won’t have gone too far. My guess is she could be staying with someone. A friend, a relative, perhaps a sympathetic adult, who’s letting her calm down before sending her home again.” Effie thought for a second. “How was her health?”
“Okay as far as we know. It sounds as if she was only pretending to be sick when she came home as an excuse to stay in her room, out of the way of her parents.”
“I’d still like to know if she’s been ill recently. Particularly if she’s been showing any signs of an eating disorder. After all, she completely avoided her tea that evening.”
“Another hunch?”
“A little piece of inside information. I have my sources.”
“How mysterious!” exclaimed Tish. “But all right, I’ll track down her doctor. Let’s hope he or she is cooperative and not all fluffed up about patient privacy.”
“The girl’s underage and missing. Make that clear if you get any resistance. Okay, you call the Quarterboys, get the name of the doctor, and follow up there. Warn them that I’m coming over this morning. Then get more copies of Tina’s photograph and line up some plods for street interviews this afternoon. I wonder if uniform have come up with anything, based on the circulation of her description?”
“They haven’t,” said Stoodby sorrowfully. He glanced up, seemingly surprised that the women were looking at him. “I checked on the way in. I didn’t mention it sooner, because I didn’t want to interrupt you.”
“Well, thank you, Trevor.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, almost flushing. “Say, Tish, put me down for the street interviews this afternoon.”
“Don’t you have other cases to be working on?” Tish asked acidly.
“Oh yes, but this seems rather more important,” Stoodby said, brimming with earnestness. “I hate to think of that poor little girl being away from her mum and dad, what with the cold weather and Christmas coming. I’ll ask Mr. Welkin if I can lend a hand.”
Tish stared at him. Effie was more circumspect.
“You’ve got enough to keep you busy?” she asked Tish.
“Yes. What are you going to do?”
“Me? I’m going to make a phone call. Then I’m going to drop in on the Quarterboys. And then I’
m going to church.”
***
Geoffrey Angelwine woke with the cloying taste of chloroform still in his nose and mouth. His immediate reaction was amazement, first at finding himself alive and then at finding himself upright after so many hours of unconsciousness. But he quickly realized that his position was secured by manacles and chains that pinned him to the wall behind him.
Geoffrey opened his eyes, to little purpose. There was no light. Was it a room? It was cold, and he sensed the air moving on his face, as if some unseen ice giant were breathing on him in the darkness. As he tentatively moved his hands across the surface of the wall, it seemed uneven and strangely sticky.
He had been in bed, that he remembered, thinking with a quiet satisfaction of the several practical jokes he had played on Oliver during the day—the depilatory in the shampoo had been particularly effective—when the noises began. Scratching, rustling, and a high-pitched breathiness, like suppressed squeaking, coming from under his bed. He was leaning over, lifting the edge of the counterpane, when something—no, several things, furry, with short arms and sour breath—had shot out, pressed the wet handkerchief over his face, and held it there.
He tried to move his arms, but the manacles were tight and strong. If only he could see. But wait—there was a light! In the distance, a flicker of flame, coming toward him along a long, rocky passageway. And two strange pink dots, glowing above it. They were like eyes, but he knew nothing or nobody that had pink eyes, apart from a rabbit maybe or a…
A cold sensation gripped his heart and caused him to sweat from every available pore. He started to quake, rattling the chains around his body. Geoffrey knew this wasn’t fear. He had experienced fear before, and this new feeling was far, far worse. There was only one word that Geoffrey could squeeze through his trembling lips, and that was…“Finsbury!”
The ferret stopped and smiled. “The same,” he drawled, lifting the candle high and forcing the shadows to shrink like rapidly drying stains around the cave walls. “Welcome to my guest room.”
“Oh my God,” cried Geoffrey, struggling with the iron chains, “somebody help me! Help!”
Finsbury stroked his whiskers fastidiously with the back of a paw, and placed the candlestick on an old packing case, the cave’s only furniture.
“Shout all you like,” he crooned. “That shmuck little Billy and all his ghastly family can’t hear you down here.”
He produced a turd-sized cigar from his velvet dressing gown and lit it in the candle’s flame, taking a few leisurely puffs.
“What do you want with me?” Geoffrey stammered.
“Want?” the ferret echoed, with mock astonishment. “Isn’t it obvious? I want you to suffer, as all practical jokers should suffer.” He blew a mouthful of foul-smelling smoke into Geoffrey’s face. “I hate practical jokers, Angelwine. I believe that every idiot who spends the morning on April the First telling his trusting friends that their flies are open and collapsing into helpless laughter, simply because they look, should be drowned in a dribble glass and buried in a coffin filled with whoopee cushions.”
“But I was only doing it for the book,” Geoffrey whined.
Finsbury smirked and stepped back. He perched himself on the packing case, crossing his legs and letting a Turkish slipper dangle from his elevated paw. He sucked contentedly on the stogie.
“What are you going to do me?” Geoffrey quavered, after several seconds of unbearable silence. He was unable to break his gaze from those porcine-pink eyes. “What fiendish yet strangely apt tortures do you have planned, you weasel from Hell? Is it the joy-buzzer that’s hooked up to 40 million volts? The fake buttonhole that squirts sulphuric acid? The gun that’s really a cigarette lighter that turns out to be a gun after all? What? For God’s sake, tell me!”
“How unsubtle,” sighed Finsbury with a languorous yawn. “No, I have something special planned for you, Mr. Angelwine. I’m going to sit here…and abuse the English language!”
Geoffrey frowned. “What? Nothing more insidiously painful? Excruciatingly agonizing? Diabolically though somehow deliciously evil?” He looked puzzled. “Frankly, Finsbury, I expected something more beastly than that.”
Finsbury shrugged. “None of us are perfect,” he said casually.
“Is,” Geoffrey muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Is perfect. None of us is perfect. You said ‘None of us are perfect.’ But ‘none’ is singular.”
“I shall have to be more careful,” said the ferret apologetically. “I’ll try to make less mistakes in future.”
“Fewer.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Fewer mistakes, not less. ‘Mistakes’ is a number, not a quantity, so it takes ‘fewer.’”
“I see. Thank you. But irregardless of these niceties—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, there’s no such word as ‘irregardless,’” Geoffrey interrupted crossly. “Good Lord, Finsbury, you of all people—sorry, polecats—should know better than to indulge in such solecisms. They set my teeth on edge. Honestly, if there’s one thing on earth that drives me to utter distraction, it’s—”
He stopped abruptly, watching the slow grin spread across the vile creature’s jaws.
“Now you get the idea,” Finsbury purred, making himself more comfortable on the crate. “Oh yes, Mr. Angelwine, it’s going to be long, long afternoon for you and for I.”
“You, you archfiend,” shouted a struggling Geoffrey, through pain-gritted teeth…
The ringing telephone caused Oliver to break off his free-flowing fantasy and peevishly save the document. He had longed to use the word “archfiend” in a Railway Mice story, and it sounded just right bleated in his imagination by Geoffrey’s voice. And for once, he wasn’t procrastinating, even though it was Saturday morning and he didn’t have to work. Geoffrey’s name would eventually be replaced with some poor woodland creature, but Oliver was pleased to have come up with a new perversion for Finsbury that had real educational possibilities for his young readers and didn’t involve the use of questionable household implements. (The hapless victim would be saved by the explosion of Finsbury’s cigar, which turned out to be a trick one sneaked into his pocket by the irritatingly resourceful Billy Field Mouse.)
“Yes,” he snapped, impatient to return to work.
“Oliver? This is your Uncle Tim.”
Oliver brightened. “Uncle Tim! Hey, you certainly answered that question.”
“What question?”
“The one in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?’”
“Very funny,” Mallard grunted at his chuckling nephew. “I had quite enough of your jokes last night.”
When Oliver and Effie had gone backstage the previous evening, they had found a embarrassed Mallard sitting disconsolately in the tiny dressing room he shared with Puck and Oberon, while the play’s producer, Humfry Fingerhood, was marching in circles in the small space, clearly agitated. Mallard had hastily completed his “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene wrapped in a Nazi flag, which he had grabbed from the back wall of the set, and by the time he returned for a shamefaced curtain call, he had changed back into his regular Bottom costume—patched corduroy jacket, jeans, Reeboks, paisley ascot, and gray silk shirt.
“I just don’t understand it,” Fingerhood was moaning. “They laughed. The audience actually laughed at your performance.”
“I know, I know,” Mallard muttered, dropping his head into his hands.
“It wasn’t supposed to be funny,” Fingerhood complained, nervously examining his fingernails. “It was my conception of what Bottom would be like if he were an ordinary amateur drama enthusiast, not some kind of clown.”
“I’m sorry, Humfry,” said Mallard. Fingerhood stopped and looked down with concern at his star actor.
“Oh, good heavens, Tim, d
arling,” he said quickly. “If I implied that your performance was more than the width of gnat’s eyebrow from perfection, you can beat me black and blue with a begonia. No, you played it exactly the way I wanted you to. Exactly the way I would have done it myself, in fact. It must be my conception of the part that’s at fault. Ah well, I’ll leave you to your guests. But I simply can’t fathom what made it all so risible…”
Fingerhood hugged Mallard and flounced pompously from the room, a short figure in a patched corduroy jacket, jeans, Reeboks, paisley ascot, and gray silk shirt. As Mallard lifted his head to watch his producer leave, Oliver was sure he saw a slight twinkle in his uncle’s eye. But it was rapidly replaced by a look of abject shame.
“Effie,” Mallard began, “I’m so sorry you had to witness that, er…”
“Base display?” Oliver asked brightly.
“Unfortunate accident,” Mallard concluded, with a momentary scowl at his nephew.
“I’ve seen worse,” she replied with a smile. “You should take a look at what’s left in the photocopier room after the squad’s Christmas party. But just out of curiosity, why weren’t you wearing any underpants?”
“It made it easier to get those tight leather trousers on,” mumbled Mallard, his voice sinking lower. “Sorry.”
“Never mind Effie, how about apologizing to me?” Oliver piped up. “You’re my uncle, so that makes it almost a Freudian experience.”
Mallard stared at him. “I’m your uncle by marriage,” he stated, “and if you want an apology, you can whistle for it. You didn’t see anything of mine this evening that I haven’t seen of yours dozens of times.”
“True,” said Oliver, “but if I recall—and actually I don’t—those occasions all happened before I was a year old, when I could often be observed posing naked for the adoring masses on a bearskin rug.”
“He’ll still do it if you slip him fifty pee,” said Effie cheerfully.
“You have just told me more than I wanted to know,” groaned Mallard, standing up and gathering his possessions. “Phoebe will be waiting for us. And for God’s sake, don’t say anything about what happened tonight. I’ll break it to her later that—”
