The Devil's Chair

by Priscilla Masters

  Well, people were strange.

  He rejected the idea. No. This was a tease from their abductor, all right. He was beginning to get a feel for this person. Martha had hit the nail on the head. Someone with a mystical sense of superiority. Someone superstitious and obscure. Someone who thought up ideas like the twisted clues of a crossword puzzle; someone who liked to make their clues none too easy. Someone who … He could have gone on and on. And all of it bad. He was learning not to trust this adversary. Her clues were not always what they seemed. A gift could be a Trojan horse guaranteed to hide some obscure evil.

  On his return to Monkmoor Police Station he was presented with the evidence bag and its sad, still sodden contents. His four leading officers were waiting for him in one of the briefing rooms.

  PC Sean Dart spoke out first. ‘We’ve cordoned off the area, sir, and asked Neil Mansfield to come in.’

  Randall looked up. ‘Good. And this, er, Freddy Ribble, the chap who found it?’

  ‘He’s a reliable witness, sir. Runs that route every morning, sometime between eight and ten a.m. He’s ex-military, very observant and absolutely certain it wasn’t there yesterday.’

  Dart’s face was anxious, his voice taut with tension. He was aware this was a test. Had he followed the correct protocol with such a significant piece of evidence in a major case? Had he got anything wrong? He waited, holding his breath. He had the feeling that while Inspector Randall could be indulgent with junior officers who tried hard, if he had mishandled this event Randall would be blistering. But for now the inspector was neither. He was appraising the evidence. And came to his conclusion. ‘So we’re looking at a twenty-four-hour slot,’ he observed, ‘sometime between, say, ten on Wednesday morning and nine forty-five this morning.’ He couldn’t resist tacking on the proviso, ‘If he’s to be believed.’

  Dart did not reply immediately but shifted uncomfortably on his feet. While it had initially occurred to him to doubt the gentleman’s word, once he had met Freddy Ribble he had been convinced. He was a perfect witness. And when his inspector met him he would agree.

  He said so and Randall smiled at him indulgently, a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Well done, Dart, he said. ‘You’re proving an asset to the Shrewsbury police.’

  Dart let out his breath with relief. He was going to fit in here all right. It was all going to be OK.

  After the nightmare comes the dream.

  ‘We’d better get this …’ Randall patted the bag, ‘… to forensics.’ The words were accompanied by a sinking feeling. In his heart of hearts he had never lost hope that Daisy Walsh was alive somewhere. Not that she was well. That would be too much to hope for after such a serious accident. But as his eyes scanned the pink towelling with its ominous stain, his brain was assessing it. Even for her age Daisy had been a very small child, a dainty little girl and this was a sizeable patch of blood. He closed his eyes for a minute and knew this signified a change in the investigation. After nearly three weeks it was becoming increasingly likely that the little girl who had played her own game of peekaboo, peeping so endearingly around a doorway, was dead, her body concealed somewhere, and the person who had torn her from the accident site was now playing another cruel game of cat and mouse with the police. Randall felt suddenly weary.

  ‘We might hit lucky,’ he said, fingering the evidence bag, but without hope in his voice, ‘and find some trace evidence of where Daisy is now but …’ He fell quiet and looked around the room. Anything else?’

  Gary Coleman spoke up, handing him a sheet of paper.

  ‘This is a list of the websites I’ve printed off Mansfield’s computer.’

  Randall read through them then looked up, confused. ‘What are they?’

  ‘Officially child model websites,’ Coleman said, ‘most of them in the States. But if you look at them the little girls are very tarted up. It looks as though Mansfield was trying to get Daisy some modelling work in America.’

  The rest of the officers clustered round, a few exclaiming at the fees promised.

  ‘A thousand pounds a job?’ Randall looked at Coleman who nodded.

  ‘It’s big business, sir.’

  ‘So that’s why those professional photographs were taken of Daisy. Did she get any work?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell, sir. I found plenty of photographs. Daisy’s never been out of the country but a passport was issued to her back in November.’ He left it at that.

  ‘Right. Anything else?’

  ‘Some sites about fertility treatment.’

  ‘They were planning on having another child?’

  Coleman shrugged.

  Delia Shaw spoke up. ‘Maybe I can help here,’ she said. ‘I spoke to Lucy Stanstead. I managed to catch her alone. The captain was away with his ship – checking it over before he sails.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She’s apparently unable to have children herself. I wonder – perhaps Neil has been searching the internet for some fertility treatment not for Tracy but for Lucy Stanstead.’ She frowned. ‘She seemed to have some half-hatched idea that Neil would leave Tracy and that they would bring up Daisy as their own. Only it seems that Tracy didn’t want to play ball. In fact, she was absolutely furious. Maybe it was that row that led to her grabbing Daisy and belting from the house.’

  Randall looked up. ‘So far from Daisy Walsh being an unwanted child,’ he observed, ‘she was a little girl very much in demand. With a value,’ he added thoughtfully, realizing they’d thought along traditional lines, of a four-year-old child being small and vulnerable. They would never have believed she could have a market value all of her own which her mother was planning to exploit. He felt slightly sick. To him a child was a child.

  ‘Tinsley?’

  Lara Tinsley shook her head. ‘Charity Ignatio’s off the hook,’ she said. ‘She didn’t come back to UK in early April. In fact, from the eighth to the tenth she was on some sort of trip to one of the resorts over in Dubai – Jumeirah.’

  ‘Nothing in this case is working out neat.’ Randall sighed.

  Mansfield arrived at six o’clock, just as the poor light of the day was fading into evening and the last of the sun dropping behind the skyline. He looked truly awful, Randall thought: pale and pasty, as though he lived below ground and never saw the light of day any more. But he looked worried rather than upset.

  He dropped his thick form heavily into a chair opposite. ‘Inspector,’ he said wearily, then, turning to Gethin Roberts, ‘Constable? What can I do for you?’

  ‘This isn’t a formal interview, Neil,’ Randall said, trying to put the poor man at his ease. ‘We know all this has been difficult for you.’

  Mansfield was not mollified but remained wary.

  ‘And we know that you are genuinely fond of Daisy.’ Then, without warning, Randall put the evidence bag on the desk. ‘As far as you can tell, Neil, is this Daisy’s dressing gown?’

  Mansfield’s started back as though repulsed by the bloody garment. His eyes fixed on the rusty stain his fingers could feel was stiff with the dried blood, even through the evidence bag, and the water seemed to seep through, cold as the grave. No sign of the lively child any more. It was simply a garment.

  Mansfield looked at each of them in turn as though wondering which one was responsible for this. His eyes narrowed; his face grew even more wary. ‘Where …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Where …’ He swallowed. ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘In Carding Mill Valley,’ Randall said gently. ‘Not far from the crash site.’ He gave Roberts a swift, warning glance.

  Don’t tell him it was put there in the last twenty-four hours.

  But Mansfield was no fool. His face hardened and he confronted the detectives with a hostile, guarded look and spoke with accusation ripening his voice. ‘So why didn’t you find it before?’

  Randall gave in. ‘Because it wasn’t there, Neil.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  Randall wasn’t going to tell him. ‘We just
know,’ he said, without inflection, without emotion.

  Mansfield licked his plump lips, slumped his shoulders and dropped his gaze back to the contents of the evidence bag. ‘And this,’ he said, his finger almost making a rasping sound over the crust of blood. ‘Is this blood?’

  ‘We’ll have to get it tested to be certain.’

  ‘Is it her blood?’

  The answer was the same but Randall had to be sure. ‘I take it then, just for the record, Neil, that this is similar to Daisy’s dressing gown?’ He was trying to heal the rift that had opened between them.

  ‘Yes.’

  Now it was time to divert Mansfield’s attention away from the garment.

  ‘There is another issue,’ he said. Mansfield looked up. Not concerned or worried, just curious.

  ‘The photographs of Daisy,’ he began. ‘PC Coleman here has taken a look at some of the websites you’ve visited.’ Randall frowned. ‘Child models and such like. Did you have aspirations for Daisy to be a child model?’

  Mansfield looked a bit confused. ‘Not exactly,’ he said very carefully. ‘The friend who took the photograph you’ve used in your publicity stuff said that she was pretty enough to use as a child model.’ Mansfield suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Nothing tacky,’ he protested.

  ‘Sure about that?’

  Mansfield simply stared. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘Some of the sites, Neil, the little girls were wearing make-up. A lot of make-up. High heels and stuff to make them look – well, tarty. Adult.’

  Mansfield still looked confused. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘We’re just trying to get to the truth.’

  Mansfield scowled.

  ‘Does anyone else have access to your computer?’

  ‘No.’ Mansfield swallowed. ‘Except …’

  And Randall clicked. ‘Did Tracy know your password?’

  ‘’Course.’ Mansfield looked confused for only one moment longer. Then it hit him with a sledgehammer. ‘She were up to summat, weren’t she?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  It quietened him and made Neil reflective. Both officers could see that his mind was burrowing into things. Randall revised the situation in his mind. Shared passwords, like PIN numbers, had a big problem. You never could tell who was pressing the keys. And certainly it could be difficult to prove in a court of law.

  He decided to appeal. ‘Help us, Neil, please.’

  Oddly enough, the appeal had quite an effect on Neil. He looked distressed. ‘And you think I’m not?’ His face twisted like a child’s. ‘You think I’m just pissing around? I want to find her just as much as you do. She was my little girl.’ Then he looked wary. ‘Our little girl,’ he corrected, which gave Randall the perfect opening. ‘Our being …’ he asked innocently.

  But Mansfield was on his guard now.

  ‘Mine and Tracy’s,’ he said smoothly.

  ‘Right. And were you and Tracy planning another child?’

  Mansfield looked positively bovine. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ His face screwed up. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Randall said sweetly.

  PC Coleman was continuing with his scrutiny of recently visited websites. He was frowning into the screen, not liking what he saw. There was something inherently wrong about the poses of the child models. He tried to find out who had been visiting the sites but there was no chance. With the same password there was no clue. Except … Coleman looked a bit more carefully. Most of these tacky little sites had been visited during the working day. Tracy herself worked evenings, mainly, leaving Neil to keep an eye on Daisy. Daisy, the lively little four-year-old who didn’t like going to bed so had to be read stories until even Neil himself fell asleep. So one p.m., two p.m. internet visits were unlikely to be him.

  Computers do leave footprints after all. It must have been Tracy who’d been visiting the child modelling sites.

  He sat back, frowning. Coleman was a conventional man. He had a long-term partner, Patty, and he had, for the last six months, been trying to pluck up courage to ask her to marry him. The trouble was firstly that he needed the right time and the right place and secondly, Patty had told him on more than one occasion (six, actually – he’d been counting) that she didn’t believe in marriage. When they’d been shopping in Chester last summer he’d observed her very carefully as they’d passed two or three bridal shops with the most fantastic displays of dresses – meringues, elegant, sexy, huge trains, glinting crystals fit to blind a man. And this was the vision Coleman had of his nuptials. He wanted the bloody lot. Church, giggling bridesmaids, dreadful speeches, sparkling wine masquerading as champagne. The lot. Unusually for a man, he loved weddings and dreamed of Patty walking towards him up the aisle, train billowing out behind her, with at least six bridesmaids in bright dresses and huge smiles, to the cheering of the few friends he had confided this particular ambition to. It would make him so happy. And then Coleman wanted the next stage of life: 2.4 children. That was what he wanted.

  But he was terrified that Patty would simply say no in that uncompromising way she had. And then he would be left with nothing. No great hopes for the future. No visions of everlasting romance and dreamy weddings. No one boy, one girl and one other. Just a great, big, wide, black, horrible tunnel of a life.

  And he didn’t like looking at these images on the computer screen. What did they say about Tracy as a mother? That she was driven by greed, rather than Daisy’s best interests? Did she even care about her child?

  Now the interview with Mansfield was over PC Roberts was following his own hunch. One phrase that the manager of the Long Mynd Hotel had used was lying untidily in his mind. Tracy was a hit with the men – and occasionally some of the women. For some reason the words were coiling around in his mind, its head wickedly peeping up, like a snake coming out of its basket in time to piped music. It wheeled and twisted, now up, now down and then looking directly at him with bold black eyes.

  And then he felt a jolt. He knew what it was. A room full of social workers. Roberts smiled. He could just imagine them. All National Health glasses and tweedy skirts, slightly offensive armpits, hair where it shouldn’t be on a woman like on the upper lip, and hugging trees for a hobby. Oh, yes. He could imagine them, glowing with goodness. Idly he wondered what the collective term for a load of social workers was: a goodness of social workers? A meddling of social workers? A kindness of social workers? An inactivity of social workers? An ineffectiveness of social workers. Social workers who drowned in their own jargon and had every excuse for doing zilch.

  It depended on your point of view, he supposed. Even his reflections thought in a Welsh lilt.

  And for some reason his next thought was to do a little snooping. After all – that is what policeman are famous for.

  A snoopery of policemen.

  I’ll just take a peek, he thought, at the guest list of the Long Mynd Hotel for the whole of last year because a silly little idea was worming its way into his brain. More a worm than a snake, then? Silly idea? Was it so silly? They had supposed from the first that the drunken argument, the accident, the missing child, Charity Ignatio being away, they had surmised that it was all coincidence. But what if it wasn’t? What if it had all been planned? But already Roberts could see a problem with this. Tracy would hardly have planned her own death, would she, silly? But what if something had been planned but it had all gone wrong? What?

  The accident.

  Roberts sat and thought. He had a feeling, silly and inconsequential as his musings might be, that he was stumbling, like a blind man over rocks, over something of significance. What he couldn’t say was what, except that he felt warm and good because he believed he was on to something.

  DI Alex Randall was pacing his office. He was on a tightrope and he knew it. If he charged Mansfield (and he didn’t even know what with) the PACE clock would start ticking. Tick-tock and he would have to let him go. Could Mansfield have been involved in the fate of his
partner and her daughter? For the life of him Randall couldn’t work it out. He had to let him go. It was a painful but necessary step. He carried on pacing his small office for a few more minutes then he gave in, put his jacket on.

  He was going home.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Friday, 26 April, 9.30 a.m.

  He couldn’t face trying to justify an appointment through Jericho Palfreyman, so he simply turned up. As he’d anticipated Jericho demurred, but seeing the complete lack of compromise on the detective’s face, for once he didn’t pursue the objection; instead he knocked on Martha’s door, stood back and let DI Randall in.

  But coming without warning or an appointment was a mistake. It was as though he had walked in on her private self and caught her with her guard down. He was seeing Martha unprepared and it gave him a shock. He instantly realized he’d barged in on her and she wasn’t looking too happy as she pored over some sheets on her desk, peering up into the computer screen and frowning.

  ‘Nursing homes,’ she said in explanation, without looking up. It struck him that she was evading his eyes, fixing her gaze on her work and she made no comment on the unexpectedness of his visit. ‘Clusters of deaths.’ Then she looked up and he saw her face was sad. ‘I can’t look into all of them, Alex,’ she said, ‘but there does seem to be one particular nursing home where the life expectancy in there is significantly lower than the others.’ Then his presence must have registered and she morphed into the coroner he knew so well, with a bright smile and a happy look. But he had seen beneath the surface and read vulnerability and sadness. Sadness she was so good at disguising. After all, she was widowed. The job was always connected with death. Her children were growing up. Perhaps her life wasn’t as full as …

  Stop it, he lectured himself.

  She must have caught his expression and half rose from her chair. ‘Alex,’ she said, concerned, ‘what is it? I heard something yesterday on the lunchtime news. Have you found her?’