The Devil's Chair

by Priscilla Masters

  For now.

  When he returned to the ward a woman in her fifties was visiting, presumably, her son. He was another pod person with thick brown hair. She was crying and a nurse had her arm around her. It distracted the doctor and his nurse so Mansfield was left alone with Tracy. He eyed the machines and wondered which one he would have to disconnect for Tracy to die.

  Then the nurse was behind him, writing something down on a huge chart on a slanting board. Mansfield plucked up courage. ‘Which machine is Tracy dependant on?’

  The nurse’s eyes slanted even more. She almost looks Chinese. ‘All of them,’ she said shortly and turned back to her charts.

  Mansfield looked at Tracy and reached out his hand to hers.

  NINE

  Wednesday, 10 April, 10.30 a.m.

  Carding Mill Valley.

  Randall scanned the area as he spoke to the forensics team. They were downsizing their search for the little girl and the move was making them all despondent. But Randall knew the search had been thorough. Wherever Daisy Walsh was it wasn’t here. Huge as the area was it was empty of features and the entire place had been fingertip scrutinized by hundreds of people, both the general public and officers trained in search and rescue. Sniffer dogs had roamed the area, using some of the little girl’s clothes to identify her scent. Yet in the square miles they had covered all they had found was the one sodden slipper which Neil Mansfield had tentatively identified as belonging to the little girl, and the Jellycat squirrel which was definitely hers. And they had DNA from the child’s saliva.

  Randall frowned, standing still, leaning into a chilly wind. How had Daisy vanished? Into the hillside? Surely, reason argued, she must have been abducted by their mystery caller? But, he unconsciously echoed Martha’s thoughts, why? What was behind all this? What dark forces? His mouth tightened. Was it possible Daisy really had been spirited away? A cloud smothered the cold spring sun and the panorama darkened as though to alert him to this possibility. In this remote and spooky place it was hard not to include the supernatural as an explanation. But if their mystery caller really had abducted the child, why had she called at all? The girls on the D of E award would have found the car crash in an hour or two. Had it been their conscience telling them that Tracy might die? Had it then been a vain attempt to save the woman’s life? And why, subsequently, had the caller not come forward? Why draw this kind of attention to herself? There was no crime here, simply a car accident and a vanished child. The abduction was the crime. Randall breathed in the purest air then opened his eyes wide. He had thought something significant. The abduction of the child was the crime. Had this turned their attention away from the possible encounter of two cars? How important was that? The fact that the caller had chosen to remain hidden only focused suspicion on her. None of it made any sense and it rattled DI Randall. The child had to be hurt. The forensics team had found evidence of blood smeared on the back of the seat in front of the child’s seat. At the very least, she would be shocked. She might well be dead. She would almost certainly need medical attention and she should be with her family, people who loved her. That pulled him up short. Who did love her? Presumably Tracy but she was in no fit state to care for her daughter. Apart from her there was only Neil. Again Randall felt that this too was significant. But for the life of him he couldn’t see how. He gave quick sigh of puzzlement and frustration.

  He and his team had spent hours talking the situation through. He’d always encouraged his officers, however senior or junior, to voice their ideas, assuring them that no one would ridicule them for at least putting forward a theory. But even the most imaginative of his team had failed to come up with any rational explanation.

  They had had strong support from both local and national press, front page headlines appealing for any information, but still nothing had turned up. It was a blank, a void, and a tragedy. It was worrying and frustrating, and the news from the hospital was discouraging. Tracy was now suffering ‘major organ failure’. Randall was no medic but he could easily work out that this was not good news. It looked as though Tracy and Neil had had their last drunken argument. As Randall stood on the Burway and looked down into Carding Mill Valley, he felt a deep despondency. He could not remember any case even remotely like this, so he had no precedent to turn to. Nothing to give him ideas and hope. Worse, looking at his officers’ faces was like staring into a mirror. All he saw was an imperfect reflection of his own confusion. He looked around at the blunt mounds of the secret hills. And reflected that, with their dark tales of folklore and legend, they weren’t helping him either.

  Needing at least some encouragement he was tempted to visit Martha again but something stopped him. It wasn’t only that it wasn’t fair to keep burdening her with his police problems. He didn’t think she minded that but … A vision of her green eyes sparkling with merriment made him smile briefly. He wasn’t being fair to her and he didn’t only mean police officer to coroner. Oh, no. It was something much deeper than that. And that was a place he could not allow himself to explore. He turned back towards the incident room. Time for a briefing.

  For now they were still working from the National Trust rooms in Carding Mill Valley, but they would only be staying there for one more week. They may as well return to Monkmoor Police Station in Shrewsbury for all the good they were doing out here. The officers were waiting for him, quiet as he entered the room. And that, in itself, was a bad sign. Usually they were raucous and noisy, confident of a satisfactory conclusion. And soon. But as he scanned the whiteboard he realized how very little they had to go on. The wait for more forensic results was always frustrating but Randall had learned to be patient – or at least not to be too impatient. The trouble was that every hour they wasted could be costing a little girl her life. She could be dying as they were waiting for results or a lead or simply just waiting. But forensics would not be hurried, and so far the only results they had were the DNA on the squirrel. The fingerprints on the telephone matched numerous other prints taken from all around Hope Cottage. They had already fingerprinted the cleaning woman and excluded her prints. ‘Probably Charity Ignatio’s,’ he said gloomily, reading the report. ‘Doesn’t exactly help us.’ Whoever the caller had been, like all felons, she – or was it conceivably a he? – appeared to have worn gloves. There were no rogue prints. It was unlikely, though not impossible, that Daisy had been in the cottage at some point, but children tend to touch things with sticky fingers, leaving plenty of prints. There was no sign of her if she had been there. No hair, prints, or anything else that could possibly place the little girl inside Hope Cottage.

  They listened yet again to the familiar recording. Even if they could be sure it was definitely a woman that would be something.

  ‘There’s a car gorn orf the Burway.’ Randall listened hard. The harshness of the voice meant it could be man or a woman. ‘Wrecked. Someone’s inside ’urt.’ Pause. ‘A woman.’

  But as he continued to listen he felt sure that this was a woman, someone in her forties – fifties possibly. The officers listened and PC Gethin Roberts made his comment. ‘She almost sounds as if she’s putting the accent on,’ he said.

  Randall pressed the pause button and eyed him quizzically.

  ‘She sounds deliberately gruff,’ Roberts persisted, his face slightly pink. ‘And, come on, who really speaks like that these days?’

  ‘Point taken, Roberts,’ he said kindly. ‘So you think if we emphasize the point that this is a local woman it could be a red herring?’

  Roberts looked dubious and a bit embarrassed.

  Gary Coleman cleared his throat. ‘Who else but a local person would be around the Stretton Hills at six o’clock in the morning at this time of year, sir?’ His fellow officers nodded their agreement. Randall pressed the play button again. The emergency room asked whether the woman was breathing.

  ‘Aaagh.’

  ‘I need your name and contact details.’

  The line went dead. The caller had said all she wa
s prepared to say.

  Randall felt chilled. The caller sounded as though she just didn’t care. Worse than that, it could even be a matter of fun to her. A tease. A joke. She was playing them along. Knowing the child was still missing four days later, it felt malicious. Whose hands was she in? Surely this person’s? But in the call there had been no mention of Daisy. No, ‘I have the little girl’. No, ‘She’s safe’. Why not?

  Nothing. No reassurance at all – only this person who seemed to be gaining the higher ground and getting plenty of satisfaction from her position too. Randall winced.

  Whose hands was Daisy Walsh in? What would they do to her? Where was she, for goodness’ sake?

  His officers looked downcast. Randall waited for suggestions but apart from house-to-house interviews, the press and TV and continued meetings with the main people involved, he felt as though he was in a prison yard, watched by vigilant guards and surrounded by four tall walls topped with razor wire and no visible door to the outside. He needed a break. A ladder.

  This was shit.

  ‘OK,’ he said finally, turned to the whiteboard and drew bullet points as he ran through four key points outlining what they already knew and their next steps. ‘We think our caller has Daisy. We think it is a woman of middle age. We think she is local. So we focus a concentrated search of all local people within, say, a ten-mile radius of Church Stretton.’

  At least it gave them something to do. He smiled. It felt as though they were getting somewhere and making the point that Daisy was probably within his ten-mile radius, even if it was an arbitrary figure, had the effect of making him feel they were progressing forwards.

  But when the officers had filed out, geographical areas allocated like slices of a pie, Randall realized he needed something more.

  And so he did something he had never done before. He roped in a forensic linguist attached to Birmingham University, a woman called Claire Tarrow. Randall was convinced: find the mystery caller and they would find Daisy. It was all in the voice. He was haunted by the question: was the child still alive? Was this a race against time? Was there any way by more inspirational policing that they could possibly save her life? Even now? As they floundered in their investigations was the child’s life ebbing away? Or were they already too late? Was she dead? Was their mystery caller concealing her body?

  He quickly moved away. It was the chance that Daisy was still alive and that they would find her that energized him and kept him and his team working longer and longer hours, barely taking a break, in a desperate search for the missing child. And all that time Tracy lay in her hospital bed, unaware of her daughter’s fate, certainly unable to help them find her, still in intensive care, intubated and with no sign of improvement. Rather, she seemed to be suffering a slow, apparently inexorable deterioration. Randall had visited her once or twice, even speaking to her, though he believed it was futile to ask if she could help them find her little girl. As he’d expected, there was no response. Not a flicker of an eyelid or a twitch of a muscle, and after ten minutes each time, realizing there was no response, that Tracy was, to all intents and purposes, the living dead, he’d left even more downhearted.

  When he’d announced to the officers still hanging around the incident room that he had requested the service of a forensic linguist Randall had initially watched a wave of sympathy ripple around the room. It only rubbed it in how desperate he was. It was called pulling out all the stops. But then, one by one, they realized the sense of the move and the sympathy turned into acceptance, then approval.

  TEN

  Thursday, 11 April, 11.10 a.m.

  Next morning Claire Tarrow turned up at Monkmoor Police Station, a neat, small woman in her thirties. Randall suspected she was aware of her height, or rather the lack of it. She wore impossibly high heels which she wasn’t very good at balancing on and which only served to draw attention to her smallness – only a little over five feet, at a guess, without the heels. With them she was a respectable five foot five. She wobbled once or twice, losing her balance, and Randall put out an arm to catch her which she acknowledged very prettily with a smile and a flash of her rather nice blue eyes. However, in spite of this, she had a confident manner and an alertness about her which was reassuring. She shook his hand with a grip that would have done credit to a professional boxer and he quickly formed the opinion that she was nobody’s fool. As he passed her the papers about the case she slipped on a pair of oversized glasses and the blue eyes were sadly hidden. She picked up the tapes and inserted them into the machine.

  She played them through three or four times without comment, making copious notes in the tiniest writing he had ever seen. He squinted across but was unable to decipher a single word.

  Finally, she looked up. ‘Just fill me in a little more about the little girl …’ she hesitated, ‘and the relationship between her mother and her partner.’

  Randall painted as realistic a picture as he could about the home circumstances, describing Neil’s flirtatious character, Tracy’s drunkenness and the rows between the two, and Claire’s face clouded over. ‘Not a million miles away from my own home life,’ she said.

  Randall murmured something sympathetic which Claire batted away as though it really didn’t matter. She started asking her questions without delay or further confidences. ‘Did you find the child’s blood in the car?’

  ‘Some. Not much. Consistent with a minor injury – a scraped knee or a cut finger. And of course we don’t know how long it has been in the car. An injury might have been sustained at some other time. It’s possible that …’ His voice trailed away.

  Claire Tarrow looked incredulous. ‘You’re saying you’re not even sure she was even in the car?’

  Alex Randall gave a long, heartfelt sigh. ‘We’re pretty sure she was,’ he said, ‘but we have to consider every eventuality.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said with heavy politeness. ‘So, let’s get down to business.’ She adjusted her glasses up her nose.

  ‘Naturally, you believe that this woman …’ she tapped the tape, ‘holds the key to the missing child?’

  ‘I’ll be honest,’ Randall said. ‘I haven’t got any other ideas. If she doesn’t know where the child is, who does?’

  ‘You’re certain she’s nowhere on the hills around the Devil’s Chair?’

  Randall replied frankly. ‘As certain as we can be. It’s a huge area. We’ve searched it as thoroughly as we possibly can. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain she isn’t there.’ He paused, frowning, but determined to be as honest and open as he could be. ‘There are a couple of caves,’ he said. ‘We have searched them and it’s unlikely that a four-year-old would have gone deep into them and not responded to someone calling her name but, I suppose, it’s not theoretically impossible. We’ve had the helicopter up with a heat-seeking device. It isn’t impossible she’s out there but if she is she’s not alive. Or, at least, not able to respond.’

  ‘So.’ She removed her glasses, holding them loosely in her fingers. ‘You want to know …?’ The blue eyes looked sharply into his.

  ‘We’re not a hundred per cent sure whether it’s a man or a woman,’ he began.

  ‘A woman. Without a doubt.’

  Randall nodded. ‘One of our officers wondered whether the caller really is local – or whether they are affecting a local accent to put us off the scent.’

  ‘Well, your officer is wrong,’ Claire said, frowning. ‘This woman is Shropshire born and bred. The way she uses words is typical of that part of Shropshire. Church Stretton and its surrounds hold a fairly isolated population. There is also a hint of Welsh in her intonation, which isn’t surprising considering we’re practically in the country.’

  Randall listened.

  ‘And she is a rural person, I’d say,’ Claire continued. ‘Not a townie and not someone who spends much time in the town. There’s very little contamination of her speech with contemporary phrases, so I suggest she’s not a great one for TV either. I think she lives an
isolated life and has probably never been resident out of the area. She’s unlikely to have gone to university. Her sentence construction and vocabulary would suggest perhaps a farmer’s wife or country dweller. The gorn orf is very telling. As is the fact that she uses the word wrecked.’ She looked up at him, frowning. ‘That’s unusual in this day and age. Most people would use the word crashed. It’s almost as though she belongs in a different time.’ She made a wry face. ‘I’m not being much help, am I?’

  ‘You can only do what you can do,’ Randall said glumly, wondering what he’d really expected from her. ‘Any idea of age?’

  ‘Forties, I’d think.’ Claire looked thoughtful. ‘Is there a mobile signal in Carding Mill Valley?’

  ‘It’s patchy. Why?’

  ‘I was just wondering if your caller had a mobile phone.’

  Randall listened.

  ‘Everyone does these days,’ Claire said, ‘even country folk. I wondered why your caller broke into a cottage and used a landline which would lead you straight to Hope Cottage?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Randall was impressed. Perhaps it was something they should have paid more attention to. He proffered an explanation. ‘It is the nearest house to the crash site so would be the obvious choice.’

  Claire persisted with her ideas. ‘Did she know it would be empty? Or was she expecting someone to answer to her knock?’

  Randall made a mental note to look again at the results of the fingerprints in and around the cottage; in particular, any prints on the front door and knocker. He wasn’t particularly hopeful. A person who had left not one fingerprint inside the cottage after she’d used the telephone would be unlikely to omit the chance of prints on the front door. But they could hit lucky.