by P. T. Reade
“Why are you buttering me up?” Amir asked with a raised eyebrow. His black bushy hair and dark brows giving him a fierce appearance belying his amiable nature.
“No butter. Just pretext,” I said.
“For what?”
“I was wondering if you might happen to know a woman named Elizabeth Ellington.”
Amir gave me a skeptical look. “It just so happens that I do. At least on paper. Several papers in fact, she’s quite well known in local circles. Why do you ask?”
“Can you keep it confidential?” I asked.
“Yeah…as long as you haven’t done anything you shouldn’t.”
“No. Nothing like that.” I mumbled, wondering what kind of man he took me for. I then proceeded to tell him about the events of the last three nights. As I came to the end of it — following her to her home and getting the address — he seemed puzzled.
“What?” I asked, noticing his look.
“Elizabeth Ellington is sort of a legend around here. She’s a recluse…a shut-in. The only time people see her around is late at night, when she goes grocery shopping at those twenty-four hour shops. She’s been that way for…I don’t know…probably the last ten years.”
“Why is she like that?” I asked. “Anti-social?”
“Her husband died of cancer…don’t remember what kind. And about two months later, her kid went missing. She just sort of shut down, I guess. She and her husband were borderline rich, so it made headlines in the local newspapers. Tragic stuff.”
“So why the hell would she want to speak to me?” I asked.
Amir shrugged. “She must have heard about the cop from New York that was in town. Just about everyone here in London with a badge looked into her kid’s disappearance and got nowhere.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Look, I’ve got to get to work. Keep me posted on this will, you?”
“Sure,” I said.
I finished my coffee and headed out to pick up some supplies I would need, now more fired up than ever that things seemed to be getting back on track for me. For once, I didn’t even mind the endless rain that had picked up to a steady downpour. Something was going on here and I was going to find out what.
SIX
Wasted heroics.
I did something that afternoon that I had never done as a cop: I spent time researching a case that I hadn’t been given. After a stint at the store I headed back to my apartment, put on a pot of coffee and spent that day researching the disappearance of Jack Ellington, Elizabeth’s son. I was typing, printing, and pinning and getting work done.
I set up a crudely fashioned crime board from the supplies I had purchased. Printouts, notes and newspaper clippings all surrounded a timeline of Jack Ellington’s disappearance. At one end I added an image of the boy himself. Barbs of grief touched me when I saw how alike Jack had been to my own son.
The other end of the whiteboard was centered around possible suspects and the ‘Unsub’. The unknown subject behind his vanishing. It was possible Jack had vanished of his own accord, but my years of experience and gut feeling told me otherwise.
The office seemed like an entirely different place as it was filled with productivity. Like the activity burned away the smoke and the memories.
All boiled down, the case was fairly simple. There were small scattered stories here and there of how a ten-year-old Jack Ellington never quite got along with his mother after his father died. Elizabeth had become very protective of Jack after losing her husband, going so far as to walk him to school. Jack was teased by his friends about this, as indicated by a few articles I read.
At some point, Elizabeth backed off and let Jack live his life like a normal ten-year-old. He walked to school with his friends, had playdates, and participated in sports. It was around this time that he went missing. According to reports, he had been walking home from soccer practice. When he was an hour late, Elizabeth had called the cops. The next morning, he was still not home, and a manhunt was launched.
The hunt never turned up anything. Not a single shred of evidence. Ultimately the case had been signed off as an unsolved disappearance.
After six hours, I had a nice stack of paper on my desk. I read back through them as the day faded out, bringing in the night. A light spattering of rain still fell, rhythmically pelting my windows. I threw together a hasty dinner of a ham and cheese sandwich, cracked open a beer, and pulled my office chair over to my window.
As I the night drew on, my mind kept returning to what Amir had told me. How solving my family’s murder wouldn’t bring them back. About how it was a waste of my talents to seek vengeance when there were people out there that needed my help. Maybe Elizabeth Ellington was one of those people. I couldn’t bring Tommy back, but if there was even the slightest chance that I could help this mother find out what happened to her son… Well, that might not be so bad.
And besides, I needed the work. If I kept spending everyday reading Sarah and Tommy’s case files over and over again, I would run out of money. If the cops didn’t deport me first, that was.
So, I kept looking out for headlights and slowly approaching cars, waiting for my nervous visitor to return. But Elizabeth didn’t show up that night. If she did, it was sometime after two in the morning, at which point I fell asleep in my chair with reports of her son’s disappearance scattered in my lap.
***
The little computer program I had pilfered was doing no good for a case that was almost 10 years old, so the following day I took a trip to the library. The grand old structure near St James’s Square was an imposing stone edifice now tinged by centuries of diesel smoke and fumes. It took nearly an hour to arrive but it felt good to be moving again, to be actively working towards something other than cheating spouses. But in the back of my mind, reality was whispering sweet nothings.
The case isn’t even yours. You’re putting all of this time and effort into it for free.
Maybe that was true, but as I sifted through all of the files and public records on the events, I didn’t care. Not once had I felt such a sense of purpose since arriving in London as a haggard and beaten man.
I managed to uncover a bit more in the public records than the internet had offered the day before. I scraped together a full timeline of the last known day of Jack Ellington’s life, from when he was seen walking on the way to school by a neighbor to the last of his friends indicating that he had seen Jack on the street, headed home, shortly after 6.00 in the evening.
With that ironed out, I also put together a list of names that, to me, seemed to be suspects. Many of them were already logged as having been questioned by police, but I wasn’t willing to rule anything out. Last on my list was the name of the officer in charge of the investigation. I didn’t think he was a suspect per se, but definitely someone that would be a great source of information.
I was about switch the library computer off when one last result caught my eye. My search had thrown up one final news story, this one from only a few days ago. It was unrelated to Ellington but the similarities were troubling enough to grab my attention. A missing schoolboy named Charlie Haines, about the same age, had disappeared right after band practice. This time from a suburb 20 miles outside of London. Hell, the kid even looked like Jack Ellington.
Could there be a connection?
***
I nearly stopped at Amir’s for lunch to fill him in on how I had decided to dig into the Ellington case. But I had things to do, people to see. Namely a man by the name of Henry Atkinson, the former police chief who had been in charge of Jack Ellington’s investigation all those years ago.
Atkinson’s record was more polished than a conflict diamond. After a tough childhood in the North of England, raised by a foster family after his parents died in a car accident, he’d gone on to an exemplary career in the Metropolitan Police. Moving from beat cop to Detective in record time, then on to Head of the Major Crimes Unit, receiving a string of awards and a New Year’s honor along
the way.
One of the trophies he’d picked up was also apparently a nice fat pension. His house was large and expensive looking. The kind of place that had a gardener and maybe housekeeper; people to cover up the dirt.
Located 40 minutes away in a high-scale Hampton neighborhood where all the houses had manicured lawns, Atkinson’s place was situated neatly in the center of an idyllic row of similar houses, its siding sparkling clean and its grass immaculate.
I parked on the edge of the street, got out and threw my jacket over my head, quickly dashing to the large porch to escape the increasing strength of the rain.
I knocked on the front door, taking in the quaint digs. A few blossoming potted plants lined the porch. A porch swing hung from the rafters at the end, like something from the cover of a cheesy college poetry magazine.
I knocked again and had to wait another twenty seconds before the door was answered. A man who looked to be in his seventies looked out at me through a partially opened door. His close-cropped beard was white, and what little hair he had remaining on his head was the same shade, trimmed in a short no-nonsense style.
“Who are you?” Atkinson snapped, skipping pleasantries altogether.
“Are you Henry Atkinson?” I asked.
“Maybe. Again…who are you?” His accent had a hint of somewhere up north.
“My name is Thomas Blume. I’m a…” I faltered. After all, what was I? “I’m a private investigator who has been hired by Elizabeth Ellington to do some digging into her son’s disappearance.” The lie came far too easily, and I wondered if it would potentially get me in some legal trouble further down the line.
I’d worry about that later, though. Currently, Atkinson was opening his door wider. “I guess you hoped I could help with some answers?” he asked.
“I was hoping, yes.”
He eyed me cautiously for a few seconds as if sizing me up, and for a moment I thought he would slam the door in my face. “We’ll see,” he said to my surprise, opening the door all the way. “That ship sailed a while ago, but I remember most of it. Come on in, Mr. Blume.”
“Thanks.”
I stepped into the house and was immediately impressed. Atkinson had done quite well for himself. The place was moderately decorated in a way that made it clear that the ex-cop was single or perhaps divorced and shopped for himself. Still, it was a grand house with rich oak floorboards and high ceilings making any visitor feel small. Awards and certificates dotted the walls while antique furniture gave the space an air of gravitas.
He led me into a small den where a large coffee table, standing between two sofas, supported several books about the military. I looked around the room, my investigators instincts kicking in as I tried to learn as much about Atkinson as I could. I skirted the edge of the mantle as I walked around one of the couches, eyeing the various trinkets and photos on display there.
“Is this your boy?” I asked in my friendliest, most casual voice. I pointed to the photo I was talking about: Atkinson—a couple of decades younger—with his arm around a young man of about thirteen or fourteen standing at the edge of a Scottish moor.
“Never had kids,” Atkinson shook his head impatiently. “That’s my nephew.” So much for my powers of deduction.
He plopped his large body into a recliner. “What can I help you with, Mr. Blume? This is one of those cases that I had a feeling about…knew it would keep cropping up.”
I opted to remain standing, until I knew the man better. “Well, as I said, Mrs. Ellington just wants to dig a little deeper. I’m new in town — an American, from New York — and I guess she just thought a fresh set of eyes could help.”
You’re far too good at lying, Blume, I thought.
“What have you uncovered so far?” he asked me.
I walked him through my research of the last few days, hoping that he would not notice how absent Elizabeth Ellington was from the picture. I told him about my timeline and the suspects I had. I then came to the one scenario I had come up with that I had not yet seen covered elsewhere. It was good to vocalize it. It made it easier for me to see if there were any holes in my theory. I found out, as I spoke to Atkinson, that there were a few, but none were big enough to swallow the case.
“Stephen Harlowe,” I said, as if it summed everything up. I mostly said it to see what Atkinson’s reaction would be.
“Jack Ellington’s teacher,” Atkinson said, leaning back arms crossed. “What about him?”
“I think he’s the one. If he didn’t take Jack, I think he probably has a damn good idea who did.”
“Under what suspicion?”
“Well, there was the bus driver who said —,”
“That would the same bus driver who stated quite clearly that Jack never rode the bus, correct?” Atkinson interrupted.
“Yes. But I looked beyond that,” I said, curtly. “Because the bus driver went on to say that he saw Jack every single day after school. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. He was usually alone on the days he had soccer practice…which he did on the day he went missing. But he never made it to practice. So no practice, and the bus driver didn’t see him. He specifically remembered not seeing him on that day after school.”
“Why specifically?” Atkinson pressed. I figured you could take the cop out of the uniform but between us we both had an instinct to interrogate.
“The bus driver had made some sort of comment about the shirt that Jack had been wearing. A band the driver liked – The Who, I believe.”
“Good work, Mr. Blume. I don’t recall ever uncovering that. Case solved.”
I shrugged, trying to tell if the old chief was being sarcastic or good-natured. “Anyway, every student in Jack’s class saw him all day long, right up until the final bell. That leaves about three minutes between filing out of class, hitting the street, and passing the bus. Harlowe was the only person of note that would have had access to Jack.”
“Circumstantial at best. Anyone could have seen the boy between then,” Atkinson said.
“That’s the one X-factor,” I said. “That’s why Harlowe was eventually dropped as a suspect. Too many what-ifs and not enough evidence.”
Atkinson nodded and then seemed to consider something. “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Blume?” he asked, reaching for a decanter of amber colored liquor.
“No, thanks,” I said, surprised at the answer.
“Well, I ask only because I feel that the conversation is over,” Atkinson said. “And I’d hate to think that you drove all the way out here for nothing more than my worthless pat on the back.”
“What do you mean?”
“The thing with the shirt might be a new discovery,” Atkinson said. “But ultimately, it’s nothing. Like the case itself. It’s too cold…dead and long gone. I fear I can’t really help you. But I will certainly make myself available for any questions you have. Next time, maybe call before driving all the way out here.” Atkinson rose from the creaky chair, signaling the end of this round.
He sounded almost sympathetic as he stiffly made his way to the hallway that would then lead me out of den and back towards the door. “You sure about that drink?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” I said, getting up. “Thank you very much for your time.” And with that, I left as quickly as I could, before I could change my mind.
It was time to visit the woman behind all this.
SEVEN
Empty memories.
Elizabeth Ellington’s house looked nicer in the daylight, but not by much. When I had passed by during the night, I had missed its design. The neighborhood she lived in was not nearly as upscale as the one Henry Atkinson called home, but it was respectable. The houses were nice, but the lawns didn’t look like something out of a magazine, and there were toys spread here and there where careless children had forgotten to pick up after themselves.
I drove up to the curb alongside Elizabeth’s large front yard, throwing my car into park. I had no way of knowing for sur
e if she was in, instead I was hoping that Amir’s description of her was accurate. If she only went out at night, surely she must be home.
I dashed through the drizzle up to the entrance and saw that the porch was about fifteen feet high. I could only imagine what the inside looked like... Not as glamorous at Atkinson’s, but still…
It must be lonely and depressing, I thought, to be in such a large home with no company other than memories of your family.
It almost made me feel bad for ringing her doorbell. I heard it sounding out from the other side of the door, a choral chime that seemed to echo forever. I waited a minute and then rang again. After the second ring, I thought I heard the faintest movements somewhere in the house.
