by Jane Adams
There was, Mike noted, no mention of the girl having her mother’s Visa card.
He dropped the paper on to the kitchen table and continued with his breakfast.
9.30 a.m.
The path to the Myers’ house was original to the building. Black, white and red tiles laid out in an ornate geometric design. It was also well worn and, in the pouring rain, treacherously slippery as Sergeant Price ran towards the front door.
Paula Myers opened it as he reached the step. Price stood in the hall, wiping his feet energetically on the doormat.
‘She has a boyfriend,’ Paula Myers announced, with as much horror, Price thought, as if she’d just found her daughter mainlining drugs.
‘Well,’ Price countered, ‘she’s of the age when girls often do.’
‘She has no time for boyfriends.’ Phillip Myers emerged from the dining-room. ‘Sarah’s studies are what’s important right now. I want her to get somewhere in life, not—’
‘Quite, sir.’ Price cut him off mid-flow. ‘Look,’ he said, more than a little annoyed. ‘You got me out here on what you said was an urgent call. Made it sound as though you’d had contact with Sarah at the very least. You can sort out your differences with your daughter later. What’s more important is does the boyfriend know where Sarah is?’
Myers stared, then shook his head and sank down into one of the high-backed chairs that stood either side of the dining-room door. He looked tired and suddenly quite grey. It was, Price thought, the first real emotion he had yet seen Myers display.
‘Have you spoken to the boyfriend, Mr Myers, Mrs Myers?’
‘No. No, that’s just it,’ Paula Myers told him. ‘We found out from one of her friends, Maddie. She didn’t want to tell, but I suppose she was more worried about Sarah than about what we might think.’ She glanced meaningfully at her husband, who looked away, angrily. ‘She gave us his name, Terry. Terry Ryan. He lives on Cavendish Road, right around the corner. But we don’t know where . . .’
Her face crumpled suddenly and she began to cry, very softly as though embarrassed. ‘We were going to knock on doors. Ask if anyone knew him.’ She looked up at Price as though waiting for him to sort it. He reached out and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll find him and I’ll call you the moment we have any news.’
She nodded bleakly, seemed to be waiting for him to leave before she completely broke down. Her husband sat still, gazing at the floor.
‘I’ll call you, straight away,’ Price reiterated, then tugged the front door open and stepped out into the rain.
It hadn’t taken long to trace Terrence James Ryan. A call back to divisional to get them to check the voters’ register and he had the address of Judith Ryan, Flat 2, on the top floor of a converted house at the end of Cavendish Road.
Price drove around the corner from Sullivan Avenue. The cordon was still up around the Howard home, but there was no one on the door. Retreated inside, no doubt, out of the foul weather. It was wrong, he thought, what they said about lightning not striking in the same place; the Howard house practically backed on to the Myers’ garden.
The address he wanted was at the other end of Cavendish Road. A tall, imposing house, similar in design to the Myers’, but this had a neglected, run-down look to it. Paint peeling from the front door and rust from the iron railing that blocked off the basement flat, staining the pavement.
There were five names, written in faded ink behind a perspex panel. No doorbell and no security. The door opened easily by an external handle, stairs straight ahead of him. Two doors leading off the hall, one to his left and one at the end of the hall. Both had Yale locks and doorbells.
Letters from the previous morning post lay unsorted on a narrow table. Price leafed through them. Mainly bills and circulars; nothing for Judith Ryan or her son.
Price glanced back at the front door. Not exactly the most security-conscious of places he’d ever been in.
The stairs were thinly carpeted and the polish on the wooden banister had more to do with the rub of hands than regular cleaning. There was grey-blue paint over faded wallpaper on the dusty walls.
Judith Ryan’s flat was on the second floor with a small rug spelling ‘Welcome’ set outside. Price knocked and rang the bell, holding it down for the count of five before letting go. The door was opened as he took his finger away and a red-haired woman who looked too young to have a teenage son stared out at him. Her eyes were red too, Price noticed, and she looked as though she’d had little sleep.
Price had his identification in his hand. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘I’m . . .’
‘It’s Terry, isn’t it? You’ve found him. What’s happened? Please, he is all right?’
Price was taken aback for an instant, then he caught on. ‘Terry’s missing?’ he said.
Judith looked blank. ‘I thought that must be why you’d come?’ she said. ‘I mean, you see, it’s not like him.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Terry didn’t come home on Friday night.’
9.30 a.m.
Max Harriman was reading the morning paper. Looking at the image of Sarah Myers on the front page it crossed his mind that this might be one of Jake’s; she certainly had the blonde looks and slightly innocent air that Jake was specializing in at the moment, like a younger version of what Marion had become.
Max frowned slightly at the memory. Marion had not been good for Jake. Max had known, from the moment Jake had become so excited about those pictures Vincenza had sent him, that Marion would not be good for him.
It was true, Marion had inspired some of Jake’s most beautiful work, some of his most original stuff, especially in the final scenes — Max couldn’t wait to see that final film — but she had involved Jake much too closely, made him think of her as something more than just another star. It had become personal and that was always a mistake.
Max sighed and shook his head. In one thing, one perception, he was well ahead of Jake. Max had learnt long ago that their type, people like himself and Jake, they weren’t made for the settled life with the one-to-one commitments that went with it. It didn’t do to get involved like that, it took away so much of your objectivity.
To be a great artist, Jake had once said, you have to be both passionate and detached about your creativity. It had been a great phrase, Max thought. The local press had thought so too. And it should have been good — it had taken Jake all day to think of it and not exactly been the easiest of speeches to slip into the conversation.
Max put his paper down and riffled through the stack of cuttings books stacked on the floor. He knew just where to find the piece he wanted, flipping open the page to show a picture of two teenage boys grinning out at the photographer and the single paragraph beside it describing the award that they had won.
The headline spoke of ‘Budding Film-makers’ winning a top award and went on to tell how Jake Bowen and Nick Jarvis had won second place in a national competition for young film-makers — documentary section — for a film made about a local factory strike.
Nicholas Jarvis. It was a very long time since anyone had called him that.
He looked closely at the two boys. Excited smiles, lousy haircuts, standing on the steps of the terraced house belonging to Jake’s parents.
They had been fifteen years old. The camera borrowed by their English teacher from a local community group. The teacher had fussed and nagged the whole time they were making their film, Max remembered. Always getting in the way.
Max smiled. Life had seemed so full of possibilities even then.
9.40 a.m.
Mike was still at John Tynan’s when Stacey rang the police station. The memory had come to her in a dream, and for a little while after waking she had lain still and thought about it. Trying to fit the dream memory into what she knew to be real.
Painfully, she re-ran the entire thing, from her storming away from Richard to the moment he had found her and driven her attacker away.
T
he tightness in her chest, the panic that this evoked was almost more than she could bear, but she knew that what she thought she remembered could be crucial. She had to go through it, sort it out.
Finally, she sat up in bed and pushed the covers aside. The telephone was downstairs in the living-room. Stacey pulled on her dressing-gown and made her way down, repeating the words in her head as though they might escape her again.
This was no dream. Stacey was certain of that now. The words had come hard on the heels of a dream, but they had come into her mind in that time between sleep and waking and now she had prodded the memory, felt the pain of it, she knew that it was real.
Her mother called to her from the kitchen as she went by. Walked silently past her father as he came into the hall. Made her way straight to the telephone and dialled the number on the card that she had been given.
She was startled to find that Mike wasn’t there.
‘Oh!’ Stacey said. ‘Well, look, can you get a message to him, get him to phone me? It is important, yes. Tell him it’s Stacey. Stacey Holmes. And that I’ve remembered something.’
Chapter Nineteen
10 a.m.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Price shrugged. ‘It’s your house.’
‘I know, but some people don’t like it. Terry doesn’t, I tend not to when he’s here.’
Price smiled. ‘Difficult things, teenagers,’ he said. ‘Think they can tell you everything.’
‘Do you have children?’
Price shook his head. ‘No, not me, never found anyone daft enough to have them with me.’
There was silence for a moment or two, then Price said, ‘You reported him missing Friday night? You got a visit, I presume?’
‘Yeah, a young constable. A quarter past one, it was.’ She smiled. ‘He looked a bit lost himself; funny, you know what they say about policemen getting younger . . .’
She trailed off, looking away from him and taking a cigarette from the pack. Her hands trembled a little as she lit the match. She was, Price thought, holding herself together very well now that he was here, but the pale face and red-rimmed eyes told a different story.
‘I thought you’d come to tell me something,’ she said. ‘I thought . . .’
‘No, like I said, I didn’t even know your son had gone missing. Uniform deals with most of the Mispers, the older ones anyway.’
‘Mispers?’
‘Missing persons. Sorry. You see, when they get to Terry’s age and there’s nothing suspicious, well, the thing is, most of them go off in a strop and turn up again the next day. Starving hungry and ready for another round of parent-baiting.’
He watched her closely, not certain he was taking the right road with her, but she smiled slightly. ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘I mean, Terry’s not a baby, but he is my son and he’s never done anything like this before, you see. And it wasn’t like we’d argued or anything. I saw him go off to school on Friday morning and he was fine. He was just fine.’ The tears were back, threatening to overflow as she blinked rapidly.
‘This girl, the one that’s missing too. Sarah. It wasn’t uniform that dealt with her?’ She looked up sharply at him, the unspoken accusation clear. Was this girl more important than her son?
‘Yes, it was. As I told you, she went to let someone into her mother’s aerobics class and never came back. There was a worry at the time that she might be another victim . . .’
‘Of this sex attacker?’
‘Yes. You see I’ve been involved in working on that one. She fitted the profile, fifteen years old, small and blonde.’
‘But Terry doesn’t even know this girl,’ Judith argued. The protest faded as soon as it was made and she sighed, ‘He never mentioned her.’ She shook her head.
Suddenly she sounded angry, frustrated. Price probed carefully, sensing that there was something more than just a son careless of what he told his mother.
‘Did he talk much about his friends?’
‘Of course he did!’
Obviously he’d touched a raw nerve. She recovered herself immediately, consciously. ‘No, not really. I mean, we haven’t lived here all that long, five, six months or so. And it’s not, well, not the sort of place you bring friends back to . . .’
‘I think it’s very nice.’ Price looked around at the poorly furnished flat. ‘You’ve done a lot to make it homely,’ he said gently and found that he really meant it. There wasn’t much in the flat that hadn’t come from a second-hand shop or cheap discount store, but the walls had been colour-washed and rag-rolled and finished with a pretty border. There were books and magazines and flowers in a cheap glass vase. An effort to make the place like home. But he could see she might feel sensitive, and if she had known about Sarah, known about the way she lived . . . The Myers house might be only round the corner but it could just as well have been a world away. It could have been a reason for Terry not to mention her, if he knew how his mother felt.
‘And he never mentioned Sarah?’ Price asked her again.
‘No, I told you. He never did.’ She hesitated, then said, ‘You see, Terry and I, I guess we were getting to know each other again. I’d got divorced, you see, and Terry didn’t live with me for quite a while.’
Price waited. There was more, but he clearly wasn’t going to get it now. He got up ready to go. Terry had no local family, she had said. No family at all, in fact. Except his grandparents, her parents, and they’d just moved abroad. No friends he might have gone to, nowhere to go.
Judith had seemed awkward and uncomfortable then. It was as though she had suddenly realized how little she knew about her son and she was shaken by the knowledge.
She’d get back to him, Price thought, when she’d had another chance to think it through.
‘I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,’ he said, as he had done with the Myers a short time before.
‘The hall phone doesn’t always work,’ she said, ‘and I don’t have one. Not here.’
‘Ah, right. I see.’ That explained why Mr Myers hadn’t been able to trace Judith himself. He’d make bets that Myers would have made a beeline for the phone book the moment he had Terry’s name.
He took a plain white card from his pocket and scribbled his name and number on it. As an afterthought he added DI Mike Croft’s as well. ‘He’s my boss,’ he said. ‘Give me a call if Terry gets in touch.’
She took the card and nodded, tears beginning again as he took his leave.
Price walked back down the four flights of stairs and let himself out of the front door. There was something very wrong with this whole scenario, he thought. He just wished that he could work out what.
* * *
Stacey’s message was phoned through to Mike at John Tynan’s cottage.
‘She didn’t say what she had remembered?’ he reiterated.
‘No, sir, insisted on talking to you. Shame to spoil your day off though. We could send a uniform round.’
‘No, no, I’ll go to see her. You said there was something about the missing girl?’
‘Yes. A bus driver called it in. He’d just picked up his morning paper and recognized the girl. He’s sure he dropped her off at Hoton about ten o’clock last night.’
‘At Hoton? He’s certain?’
‘Seems so.’
‘No more news on David Martin, I suppose?’
There was not. Mike hung up thoughtfully.
‘Hoton?’ Maria asked him.
‘Our runaway. A bus driver thinks he remembers dropping her off there about ten o’clock last night.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I have to go, I’m afraid, see this girl, Stacey.’
‘Right. Look, I’ll head back to Oaklands, I’ll give you a call later.’
* * *
Stacey told him about her dream that was not a dream. She went through it calmly and in careful detail. She might, Mike thought, have been describing a shopping trip or her holiday plans, until you looked at the way her hand
s were shaking.
‘And you’re sure that’s what he said?’
‘Quite sure, Inspector Croft.’ She took a deep breath and said the words again. ‘He said, “I know you want it, Marion. I know you do. I know you do.” ’
Her words were flat, deliberately devoid of all feeling or tone.
‘And the name was Marion. Not Mary or Marie or anything similar? You’re absolutely certain about that?’
Stacey nodded. ‘It’s not a common name,’ she said. ‘I mean I know two Maries and even a Mary, though she’s older than me. But Marion. I don’t think I’ve ever even met a Marion. So I know I’ve got it right.’
Mike thanked her and got up to go.
‘Do you think it will help you?’ Stacey asked him.
He nodded. ‘Yes, I really think it might. As you say, Marion isn’t that common a name. It could be very significant. And I want you to know, I think you’re handling this brilliantly.’
She half-smiled at him. ‘I don’t feel brilliant,’ she said. ‘Only I keep telling myself, he didn’t really hurt me and I wasn’t raped. Not like those other girls. I keep telling myself that.’
Mike left her, his mind a turmoil of possibilities.
No, Marion was not a particularly common name. Unusual enough to be distinctive. And he could not help but make the connection. Marion had been the name of the woman whose death Price was now following up, and Marion O’Donnel had Theo Howard’s number in her book.
* * *
2 p.m.
John Tynan was astonished to find David Martin on his doorstep.
‘You’ve got to let me in, John. I have to talk to someone.’
‘How about talking to the police?’ John questioned. ‘They’re looking for you.’
Davy shook his head. ‘I know, at least, I guessed they must be.’
John Tynan looked thoughtfully at the young man standing on his doorstep. He was unshaven and rumpled; his clothes looked as though he’d slept in them. Very different from the smartly dressed figure John had usually seen at Theo’s.
