There was a hard edge to that last word, a clear warning that they’d best take him seriously. All three of them squirmed in their chairs, but there was no outward disagreement.
‘Right. Now may I have your names, please?’
Baldy turned out to be one Morris Rose, artists’ representative. His staff consisted of Spotty, otherwise known as Lester Small, who handled publicity, and Glasses, the secretary, bookkeeper, and general dogsbody, whose name was Thomas Fuller.
They did not in fact have much to tell beyond the bare facts, but they took some time to tell it, interspersed with wailings about how this loss was going to affect them.
The firm, Rose & Co., Ltd, was in fact a very small organization. Morris Rose had begun as an impresario, finding new talent and promoting them to performance venues and recording companies. As more and more rising would-be stars came his way, he decided that he could handle more aspects of the business with a little more help. So he hired Small to publicize his people, and soon realized that someone who knew something about business and money was also essential.
So they had struggled along, paying the rent on the office, finding a few modestly talented performers whose flames burned frantically for a brief time, but who turned out to be meteors rather than stars, falling to earth in a shower of sparks after their fifteen minutes of fame.
And then Peter James had come along.
‘What is his real name?’ asked Alan.
‘Thought you was friends of his,’ said Rose, suspicion sharpening his voice.
‘We are, but we met him as Paul Jones – and he told us that wasn’t his real name, but he didn’t confide the real one.’
Rose shrugged. ‘I don’t know any other but Peter James.’
I turned to Fuller. ‘You must have filled out forms to pay him. He would have had to show his identification.’
‘It was some ordinary name. I don’t remember.’ Fuller sat on the base of his spine and looked sulky.
‘Would you look it up for me, please?’ asked Alan. It was phrased as a request, but Fuller knew it was an order. He uncoiled from the chair and slouched off.
‘So he came to the office, wanting to audition,’ Alan prompted Rose.
‘No, he didn’t come to us. I found him! Somebody sent me an email with a link to a YouTube video.’ He looked at us doubtfully.
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘I do know about YouTube.’
‘All kinds of stuff out there. Mostly rubbish. But this singer – he was fantastic! Oh, a bit rough, needed some polish, but I knew right away he was going to be it! So I dug around a little, found out how to get in touch with Peter James, called him, and the rest, as they say, is history.’
‘History is right,’ said Fuller, returning. ‘There’s a wad of money tied up in that lad, and now he’s disappeared. Browne,’ he said to Alan.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Name’s Browne. Matthew Browne.’
I would have chuckled if I hadn’t been so worried about Paul. What a lot of fake-sounding names we were dealing with! One forgets that there really are lots of people named Smith and Browne and Jones. I suppose, somewhere out there, there are some John Does and Richard Roes, too.
‘May I have the rest of his personal information, please? Age, birthplace, current address.’
‘Look, Mr Nettle,’ said Rose. ‘You said you know something about where Peter might be, but so far you’re the one asking all the questions. How about giving a little in return?’
‘Soon,’ said Alan calmly. ‘His personal data?’ he asked Fuller again.
‘Age twenty, born Winchcombe, Glos., gave a post office box in Cheltenham as his address.’
‘Cheltenham,’ I said, giving Alan a significant look.
He nodded. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. Now, may I ask when you last saw . . . I’ll call him Peter, for now.’
‘Yesterday,’ said Rose. He stood and began to pace. ‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘Just before you called,’ put in Small, looking at me.
‘And everything sweet as can be. He’s got manners, the kid has. Yes, sir, and thank you, sir, and always right on time, every place he’s supposed to be. Last thing he said, we’ll turn up around nine so there’s time to get to the studio, he says. And then we come in this morning and there’s this note!’
He pulled it out of his pants pocket. It had obviously been wadded up and then smoothed out. He gave it to Alan and I looked over his shoulder.
‘I have to go,’ it said, in an almost illegible scrawl. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll be in touch.’ It was signed simply ‘Peter’.
‘This is his handwriting?’ Alan asked the obvious question.
‘That’s the thing! I don’t know!’ Rose would have torn his hair out if he’d had any. ‘We did everything by phone, text, email.’
‘It’s his signature,’ said Fuller.
‘And you didn’t find it until this morning? Surely he didn’t remain in the office after everyone had left.’
‘Slipped under the door,’ said Fuller, sliding even farther down in his chair. ‘It was on the mat.’
‘How could he have got into the building? Is it locked at night?’
‘Not till ten.’
‘And is there a night watchman?’
‘No. Look, Nelton—’
‘Nesbitt,’ said Alan, his voice neutral. ‘Yes, I’ll tell you what I know, though it isn’t a lot. We, my wife and I, met the young man in Broadway over a week ago. He was staying at our B-and-B under the name of Paul Jones. We had an . . . encounter . . . with him on the second day of our holiday, after which he apparently left town. We neither saw nor heard anything of him until the television programme on Saturday night. We had been rather worried about him and were relieved that he was apparently all right.’
‘So what?’ said Rose. ‘Nothing new there. We knew he was taking a little holiday, resting up for the big gig.’
‘Yes. But what you don’t know is that when we saw him last, he was in a condition of extreme fear. Neither do you know that a man was murdered just outside Broadway that same day. Nor that a woman who had been a mentor to Paul . . . er, Peter . . . when he was young, and was looking for him in Broadway, has now gone missing herself, failing to keep an important appointment. She has not answered her mobile for several days. Now do you understand why my concern extends beyond an aborted recording session?’
NINETEEN
The silence in the room was heavy. Then Rose cleared his throat. ‘I get the point. You’re a bleedin’ humanitarian, and I’m a crass commercial git. OK. Actually I’m a little nicer than you think. I like the kid. But y’see, I want him back just as much as you do. Maybe not for all the same reasons, but I want him back, bad. So what can I do? What can we do? I put my entire staff at your disposal.’ He made an expansive gesture that took in the office, its outdated furnishings, and his two employees.
Alan smiled in spite of himself. ‘I appreciate that, sir. Your best approach is simply to cooperate with the police.’
Rose sighed heavily. ‘Yeah, I suppose we got to call them. But the publicity . . .’
‘I thought there was no such thing as bad publicity,’ I said brightly.
‘Having the hottest item in the business mixed up with a murder isn’t the greatest,’ muttered Small. ‘It’ll be all over the Net in five minutes.’
‘Wait!’ I said, an idea bubbling up. ‘Wait a minute.’
They looked at me, Alan with the liveliest apprehension.
‘No, it’s a good idea. Really! A contest! Have a contest to locate Paul, I mean Peter.’
Mystification on all faces except Small’s. He began to brighten. ‘“Where’s Wally”, or whoever it was?’
‘Exactly!’ Since nobody else seemed to get it, even Alan, I explained. ‘A few years ago there was this silly game, in the comics and I suppose online, though I didn’t own a computer back then. You had to locate one face in a huge crowd, and it wasn’t easy. I think there were prizes. Now. Peter Ja
mes is a sensation just now. He has a website, and I suppose all the rest of the electronic nonsense I don’t understand, blags and all that.’
‘Blogs,’ said Small.
‘Yes, blogs, thank you. The point is, he’s highly visible. Now. Suppose you launch a competition. The first person to spot Peter James – in real life, I mean, not in a picture – wins something. Lunch with him, or something like that. You’d have every teenager in the country looking for him.’
‘In the world,’ said Rose, beginning to like the idea. ‘He’s really big in China.’
‘Now, hold on,’ said Alan. He ran his hand down the back of his head. ‘You plan to tell the world that Peter . . . Paul . . . I wish we could agree on a name for him . . . that the young man is missing?’
‘No,’ said three of us at once. ‘No,’ I continued. ‘Make it seem as if he’s part of the fun, that he’s hiding. Then people will really look for him, not just hope to spot him by accident. Instead of having a few dozen, or a few hundred, policemen keeping an eye out, you’ll have thousands—’
‘Millions,’ interjected Rose firmly.
‘—millions of fans actively searching. He’ll be found in no time.’
‘And by whom?’ asked Alan, very quietly. ‘Have you all forgotten that he may have witnessed a murder?’
‘Alan, that’s not important any more!’ I said hotly. ‘If someone was after him, he could have been found long ago. It took us about fifteen minutes on the Internet. Whatever he’s running from, or to, the murder has nothing to do with it.’
In which I was both right, and tragically wrong.
We argued about it for a few minutes, but with four of us on one side, and Alan on the other, the outcome was never in question. Alan, with a shake of his head, conceded, and went to call the police about Paul’s disappearance, while Small hurried to set up a fast addition to the various websites and blogs and whatever, announcing a major competition called ‘Where’s Peter?’. Fuller unlocked the office door and started dealing with missed phone calls, while Rose coped with the backup group and I sat around feeling fairly useless and somewhat unhappy.
I dislike quarrelling with Alan over anything more serious than beef or chicken for supper. For one thing, he’s so often right that I end up making a fool of myself. Especially in anything remotely resembling police matters, of course, he’s the expert and I’m merely a hanger-on. Mostly, I just hate finding myself crossways with him.
I got up and found the office where he had found a little privacy for his phone call. He was just putting the phone back in his pocket.
‘What? What is it?’ He looked extremely worried, his face set, his shoulders rigid. ‘Something’s wrong. What?’
‘Jo Carter made a nine-nine-nine call yesterday, from someone else’s mobile. She could speak only in a whisper, but she told them where she was and said she was in great danger.’
My breath was coming in shallow gasps.
‘When the response team got to the place, the phone was there, pretty well smashed to bits, but she was gone.’
‘Didn’t anyone know where she was?’
‘There was no one else around. She had called from a disused shed on a farm near Broadway.’
‘What on earth was she doing there?’
‘That’s only one of the things no one knows. But Dorothy . . . there were signs of a struggle. Not just the broken phone, but footprints in the mud, as if at least two people had slid in it, one of them barefoot. And . . .’ He paused and looked at me unhappily. ‘And smears of blood on the door frame. Fresh blood.’
I blinked away tears. ‘And they’re looking for her?’ It was a silly question. Of course they were. If they’d found any trace of her, Alan would have told me.
‘They’re doing everything they can, love. They did find her car, almost immediately.’
My question showed in my face.
‘In Broadway, abandoned on a side street. Keys still in it.’
‘And now Paul . . .’
Alan’s face showed his distress. ‘Of course I told them about Paul, and they’ll be looking for him, too.’
‘Maybe we’d better call off the competition. This changes everything.’
‘No, actually the superintendent thinks it’s not a bad idea. We need every scrap of information we can get, and Paul almost certainly has some of the answers.’
‘So does that woman at the shelter, what’s her name?’
‘Mrs Bryant. They went to talk to her again. They’re probably there at this very moment.’
I fought down a sob. It turned into a hiccup. ‘Alan, that poor woman! What can we do?’
‘Not much, I’m afraid. Wait. Try to use our brains. Pray.’
We didn’t tell Rose or Co. about Jo. There seemed no reason for them to know. They were doing all they could to find Paul, for their own reasons. We did tell them the police would be calling on them soon to glean every detail about Paul’s disappearance.
‘We already told you everything,’ said Rose. ‘Didn’t you tell them?’
‘They want to hear it from you,’ said Alan patiently. ‘And you might remember something when you tell it again. People do. That’s why the police ask questions over and over again, causing considerable irritation, I might add.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Rose spread his hands. ‘I better get back to work.’
‘I don’t think,’ I said when we were back in the elevator, ‘that he has a whole lot of work to do.’
‘It does rather look as if Paul is his only important client, doesn’t it? No wonder he’s furious.’
‘At least it means he’ll make every possible effort to find him.’
We drove back to the cottage in near-silence. It was still early. ‘Shall I make some tea?’ I asked. ‘Or shall we walk? It’s a beautiful day . . . and walking helps me think.’
‘Why don’t you bring your notebook?’
I dropped it in a pocket, found my sunglasses and my walking stick, and set out.
It truly was a beautiful day. The rain earlier in the week had washed the earth until it looked newly made. ‘This is England,’ I said softly, echoing my thoughts of a few days before.
‘Oh, no,’ said Alan, smiling at me. ‘There’s no smell of salt, no sound of waves or sea birds.’
I smiled back. Alan had grown up in Cornwall, in the tiny village of Newlyn, his father a fisherman. ‘Ah. Like cornfields and red-wing blackbirds.’
Alan had visited Indiana with me. He understood, and took my hand. ‘Nevertheless, this is very pleasant. Far too pleasant for our subject matter.’
‘Yes.’ I dragged my mind back to the disagreeable task at hand and pulled out the notebook. ‘Shall we go back to our list of queries?’
Alan nodded.
I studied the page. ‘Well, we’ve answered some of the questions about Paul. We know his real name, though I can’t think of him as anything but Paul. We know something of his background, which we didn’t even think to ask before. We don’t know what he was doing in Broadway, though.’
‘We’ll find out all the answers about him when we find him – or somebody finds him. What else?’
‘The really important one, I think. Why was Jo looking for Paul? Why was she so concerned about a missed appointment? We can figure out why she stayed in Cheltenham to look for him – because that’s where he stayed when she knew him before.’
‘And he did go there. Let’s not forget that.’
‘You know, I had almost forgotten. And he ran away when I saw him.’
‘And yet, a few days later, he was appearing on television for the whole world to see. It was a live broadcast, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, I checked.’
‘So he really was in Birmingham that night, and not in hiding. He was there the next several days, too, and making no secret of it.’
‘That implies that if he left Broadway out of fear, it must not have been fear for himself, or he would have stayed in hiding. Fear for someone else?’
‘We had thought that earlier. Maybe . . . Alan, maybe he went to Cheltenham because he was afraid for Jo. Maybe he went to warn her! Remember, she said, when we met her in the church, he had made an appointment with her and not kept it.’
‘I wasn’t sure she was telling the truth.’
‘I wasn’t either, but suppose she was. Suppose he made that appointment, and then something made him change his mind.’
‘What? And why would he need to warn her, as you put it, about anything? What threat might there have been to her?’
‘I don’t know.’ I stopped in the middle of the footpath; Alan nearly fell over me. ‘But whatever it was, it’s caught up with her, hasn’t it?’
He put an arm around my shoulders and we stood for a few moments, looking out at the beautiful hills, the silly, innocent sheep, and thinking about the evil that could hide there.
‘Even in Eden, there was the serpent.’ Alan spoke my thoughts.
TWENTY
We walked, not paying much attention to our surroundings. ‘Alan,’ I said after a while, ‘do they have your phone number?’
‘“They”?’
‘The Gloucestershire police. Rose and Co. Anybody who might hear from Paul.’
‘Yes, love. I’ll know when anyone learns anything.’
‘And meanwhile there’s nothing we can do.’
‘We can walk. And breathe this lovely clean air, and look at the beauties of the earth. And try to remember that the earth doesn’t turn at our twirling.’
‘Thank you, Eliza Doolittle.’ We walked on, each absorbed in our own thoughts.
‘Alan, she’s a town person,’ I said suddenly. ‘What was she doing in a shed?’
He didn’t have to ask who I meant. ‘How do you know she’s a town person?’
‘She lives in Cheltenham, and has for a long time.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘She’s been working at the shelter for years.’
‘Doesn’t mean she lives there. She could live in any village nearby. As to what she was doing in a shed . . . we don’t know that, do we?’
The Evil that Men Do Page 13
