Albert Simms seemed surprised to see him.
Simms had just finished one of his brewery tours. Rebus was sitting at a table in the sample room, nursing the best part of a pint of IPA. It had been a busy tour: eight guests in all. They offered Rebus half-smiles and glances but kept their distance. Simms poured them their drinks but then seemed in a hurry for them to finish, ushering them from the room. It was five minutes before he returned. Rebus was behind the pumps, topping up his glass.
“No mention of Johnny Watt’s ghost,” Rebus commented.
“No.” Simms was tidying the vests and hard-hats into a plastic storage container.
“Do you want a drink? My shout.”
Simms thought about it, then nodded. He approached the bar and eased himself on to one of the stools. There was a blue folder lying nearby, but he tried his best to ignore it.
“Always amazes me,” Rebus said, “the way we humans hang on to things – records, I mean. Chitties and receipts and old photographs. Brewery’s got quite a collection. Same goes for the libraries and the medical college.” Rebus handed over Simms’s drink. The man made no attempt to pick it up.
“Joseph Cropper’s wife never had a daughter,” Rebus began to explain. “I got that from Joseph’s grandson, your current boss. He showed me the archives. So much stuff there … ” He paused. “When Johnny Watt died, how long had you been working here, Albie?”
“Not long.”
Rebus nodded and opened the folder, showing Simms the photo from the Scotsman, the one of the brewery workers in the yard. He tapped a particular face. A young man, seated on a corner of the wagon, legs dangling, shoulders hunched. “You’ve not really changed, you know. How old were you? Fifteen?”
“You sound as if you know.” Simms had taken the photocopy from Rebus and was studying it.
“The police keep records, too, Albie. We never throw anything away. Bit of trouble in your youth – nicking stuff; fights. Brandishing a razor on one particular occasion – you did a bit of juvenile time for that. Is that when Joseph Cropper met you? He was the charitable type, according to his grandson. Liked to visit prisons, talk to the men and the juveniles. You were about to be released, he offered you a job. But there were strings attached, weren’t there?”
“Were there?” Simms tossed the sheet of paper on to the bar, picked up the glass and drank from it.
“I think so,” Rebus said. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say I know so.” He rubbed a hand down his cheek. “Be a bugger to prove, mind, but I don’t think I need to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you want to be caught. You’re an old man now, maybe only a short while left, but it’s been plaguing you. How many years is it, Albie? How long have you been seeing Johnny Watt’s ghost?”
Albert Simms wiped foam from his top lip with his knuckles, but didn’t say anything.
“I’ve been to take a look at your house,” Rebus continued. “Nice place. Semi-detached; quiet street off Colinton Road. Didn’t take much searching to come up with the transaction. You bought it from new a couple of months after Johnny Watt died. No mortgage. I mean, houses were maybe more affordable back then, but on wages like yours? I’ve seen your pay slips, Albie – they’re in the company files, too. So where did the money come from?”
“Go on then – tell me.”
“Joseph Cropper didn’t have a daughter. You told me he did because you knew fine well it would jar, if I ever did any digging. I’d start to wonder why you told that particular lie. He had a wife though, younger than him.” Rebus showed Simms a copy of the photo from the cemetery. “See how her husband’s keeping a grip on her? She’s either about to faint or he’s just letting everyone know who the boss is. To be honest, my money would be on both. You can’t see her face but there’s a photo she sat for in a studio … ” Rebus slid it from the folder.
“Very pretty, I think you’ll agree. This came from Douglas Cropper, by the way. Families keep a lot of stuff, too, don’t they? She’d been at school with Johnny Watt. Johnny, with his eye for the ladies. Joseph Cropper couldn’t have his wife causing a scandal, could he? Her in her late teens, him in his early thirties … ” Rebus leaned across the bar a little, so that his face was close to that of the man with the sagging shoulders and face.
“Could he?” he repeated.
“You can’t prove anything, you said as much yourself.”
“But you wanted someone to find out. When you found out I was a cop, you zeroed in on me. You wanted to whet my appetite, because you needed to be found out, Albie. That’s at the heart of this, always has been. Guilt gnawing away at you down the decades.”
“Not down the decades – just these past few years.” Simms took a deep breath. “It was only meant to be the frighteners. I was a tough kid but I wasn’t big. Johnny was big and fast, and that bit older. I just wanted him on the ground while I gave him the warning.” Simms’s eyes were growing glassy.
“You hit him too hard,” Rebus commented. “Did you push him in or did he fall?”
“He fell. Even then I didn’t know he was dead. The boss … when he heard … ” Simms sniffed and swallowed hard. “That was the both of us, locked together … we couldn’t tell. They were still hanging people back then.”
“They hanged a man at Perth jail in 1948,” Rebus acknowledged. “I read it in the Scotsman.”
Simms managed a weak smile. “I knew you were the man, soon as I saw you. The kind who likes a mystery. Do you do crosswords?”
“Can’t abide them.” Rebus paused for a mouthful of IPA. “The money was to hush you up?”
“I told him he didn’t need to – working for him, that was what I wanted. He said the money would get me a clean start anywhere in the world.” Simms shook his head slowly. “I bought the house instead. He didn’t like that, but he was stuck with it – what was he going to do?”
“The two of you never talked about it again?”
“What was there to talk about?”
“Did Cropper’s wife ever suspect?”
“Why should she? Post-mortem was what we had to fear. Once they’d declared it an accident, that was that.”
Rebus sat in silence, waiting until Albert Simms made eye contact, then asked a question of his own. “So what are we going to do, Albie?”
Albert Simms exhaled noisily. “I suppose you’ll be taking me in.”
“Can’t do that,” Rebus said. “I’m retired. It’s up to you. Next natural step. I think you’ve already done the hard part.”
Simms thought for a moment, then nodded slowly. “No more ghosts,” he said quietly, almost to himself, as he stared up at the ceiling of the sample room.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Rebus said.
“Been here long?” Siobhan Clarke asked as she entered the Oxford Bar.
“What else am I going to do?” Rebus replied. “Now I’m on the scrap-heap. What about you – hard day at the office?”
“Do you really want to hear about it?”
“Why not?”
“Because I know what you’re like. Soon as you get a whiff of a case – mine or anyone else’s – you’ll want to have a go at it yourself.”
“Maybe I’m a changed man, Siobhan.”
“Aye, right.” She rolled her eyes and told the landlord she’d have a gin and tonic.
“Double?” he asked.
“Why not?” She looked at Rebus. “Same again? Then you can make me jealous by telling me stories of your life of leisure.”
“Maybe I’ll do that,” said Rebus, raising his pint-glass and draining it to the very last drop.
DOLPHIN JUNCTION
Mick Herron
I
“DON’T TRY TO find me,” the note began. It was written on the back of a postcard. “Believe me, it’s best this way. Things aren’t working, David, and they haven’t been for a long time. I’m sorry, but we both know it’s true. I love you. But it’s over. Shell.”
On the kitchen wall, th
e clock still ticked, and outside the window, one of the slats in the fence still hung loose, and the fence remained discoloured where ivy had been peeled from it during the garden makeover two weeks previously. The marks where it had clung still resembled railway lines as seen on a map. If you could take a snapshot of that moment, nothing would have changed. But she was gone.
“And this card was on the kitchen table.”
“As I’ve already told you, yes.”
“And there’s no sign of a break-in, no disturbance, no—”
“I’ve told you that too. There’s no sign of anything. She’s just disappeared. Everything else is the same as always.”
“Well. You say disappeared. But she’s fairly clearly left of her own accord, wouldn’t you say?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that at all.”
“Be that as it may, sir, that’s what the situation suggests. Now, if there were no note I’d be suggesting you call her friends, check with colleagues, maybe even try the hospitals just in case. But where there’s a note explaining that she’s gone of her own free will, all I can advise is that you wait and see.”
“Wait and see? That’s what you’re telling me? I should wait and see?”
“I’ve no doubt your wife will be in touch shortly, sir. These things always look different in the plain light of day.”
“Is there someone else I can talk to? A detective? Somebody?”
“They’d tell you exactly what I’m telling you, sir. That ninety-nine point nine per cent of these cases are exactly what they appear to be. And if your wife decides to leave you, there’s not a lot the police can do about it.”
“But what if she’s the point one per cent? What happens then?”
“The chances of that are a billion to one, sir. Now, what I suggest you do is go home and get some rest. Maybe call into the pub. Shame not to take advantage, eh?”
He was on the other side of a counter, in no position to deliver a nudge in the ribs. But that’s what his expression suggested. Old lady drops out of the picture? Have yourself a little time out.
“You haven’t listened to a word, have you? My wife has been abducted. Is that so difficult to understand?”
He bristled. “She left a note, sir. That seems clear enough to me. Wrote and signed it.”
“But that’s exactly the problem,” I explained for the fourth time. “My wife’s name isn’t Shell. My wife – Michelle – she’d never sign herself Shell. She hated the name. She hated it.”
***
In the end I left the station empty-handed. If I wanted to speak to a detective, I’d have to make an appointment. And it would be best to leave this for forty-eight hours, the desk sergeant said. That seemed to be the window through which missing persons peered. Forty-eight hours. Not that my wife could be classed a missing person. She had left of her own accord, and nothing could convince him otherwise.
There’d be a phone call, he said. Possibly a letter. He managed to refrain from asserting that he’d put good money on it, but it was a close-run thing.
His unspoken suggestion that I spend the evening in the pub I ignored, just as he’d ignored the evidence of the false signature. Back home, I wandered from room to room, looking for signs of disturbance that might have escaped me earlier – anything I could carry back to the station to cast in his smug stupid face. But there was nothing. In fact, everything I found, he’d doubtless cite as proof of his view of events.
The suitcase, for example. The black suitcase was in the hall where I’d left it on getting home. I’d been away at a conference. But the other suitcase, the red one, was missing from its berth in the stair-cupboard, and in the wardrobe and the chests of drawers were unaccustomed gaps. I have never been the world’s most observant husband. Some of my wife’s dresses I have confidently claimed never to have seen before, only to be told that that’s what she’d been wearing when I proposed, or that I’d bought it for her last Christmas. But even I recognized a space when I saw one, and these gaps spoke of recent disinterment. Someone had been through Michelle’s private places, harvesting articles I couldn’t picture but knew were there no longer. There were underlinings everywhere. The bathroom cabinet contained absences, and there was no novel on the floor on Michelle’s side of the bed. Some of her jewellery was gone. The locket, though, was where it ought to be. She had far from taken everything – that would have entailed removal lorries and lawyerly negotiation – but it seemed as if a particular version of events were establishing itself.
But I didn’t believe Michelle had been responsible for any of this. There are things we simply know; non-demonstrable things; events or facts at a tangent from the available evidence. Not everything is susceptible to interrogation. This wasn’t about appearances. It was about knowledge. Experience.
Let me tell you something about Michelle: she knows words. She makes puns the way other people pass remarks upon the weather. I remember once we were talking about retirement fantasies: where we’d go, what we’d do, places we’d see. Before long I was conjuring Technicolor futures, painting the most elaborate visions in the air, and she chided me for going over the top. I still remember the excuse I offered. “Once you start daydreaming,” I told her, “it’s hard to stop.”
“That’s the thing about castles in Spain,” she said. “They’re very moreish.”
Moreish. Moorish. You see? She was always playing with words. She accorded them due deference. She recognized their weight.
And she’d no more sign herself Shell than she’d misplace an apostrophe.
When I eventually went to bed, I lay the whole night on my side of the mattress, as if rolling on to Michelle’s side would be to take up room she’d soon need; space which, if unavailable on her return, would cause her to disappear again.
II
The mattress is no more than three inches thick, laid flat on the concrete floor. There is a chemical toilet in the opposite corner. The only light spills in from a barred window nine foot or so above her head. This window is about the size of eight bricks laid side by side, and contains no glass: air must come through it, sound drift out. But here on floor level she feels no draught, and outside there is no one to hear any noise she might make.
But he will find her.
She is confident he will find her.
Eventually.
III
Forty-eight hours later, I was back in the police station.
Much of the intervening period had been spent on the telephone, speaking to an increasingly wide circle of friends, which at its outer reaches included people I’d never met. Colleagues of Michelle’s; old university accomplices; even schoolmates – the responses I culled varied from sympathy to amusement, but in each I heard that chasm that lies between horror and delight; the German feeling you get when bad things happen to other people.
At its narrower reach, the circle included family. Michelle had one parent living, her mother, currently residing in a care home. I’m not sure why I say “currently”. There’s little chance of her future involving alternative accommodation. But she’s beyond the reach of polite conversation, let alone urgency, and it was Michelle’s sister – her only sibling – that I spoke to instead.
“And she hasn’t been in touch?”
“No, David.”
“But you’d tell me if she had?”
Her pause told its own story.
“Elizabeth?”
“I would reassure you that nothing bad had happened to her,” she said. “As I’m sure it hasn’t.”
“Can I speak to her?”
“She’s not here, David.”
“No, it certainly sounds like it. Just put her on, Elizabeth.”
She hung up at that point. I called back. Her husband answered. We exchanged words.
Shortly after that, I began drinking in earnest.
Thursday evening was the forty-eight-hour mark. I was not at my best. I was, though, back at the police station, talking to a detective.
“So y
our wife hasn’t been in touch, Mr Wallace?”
I bit back various answers. No sarcasm; no fury. Just answer the question. Answer the question.
“Not a word. Not since this.”
At some point I had found a polythene envelope in a desk drawer; one of those plastic flippancies for keeping documents pristine. Michelle’s card tucked inside, it lay on the table between us. Face down, which is to say, message-side up.
“And there’s been no word from anyone else?”
“I’ve called everyone I can think of,” I said.
This wasn’t quite true.
“You have my sympathy, Mr Wallace. I know how difficult this must be.”
She – the detective – was young, blonde, jacketless, with a crisp white shirt, and hair bunched into the shortest of tails. She wore no make-up. I have no idea whether this is a service regulation. And I couldn’t remember her name, though she’d introduced herself at the start of our conversation. Interview, I should probably call it. I’m good with names, but this woman’s had swum out of my head as soon as it was spoken. Then again, I had distractions. My wife was missing.
“Can we talk about background details?”
The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime Volume 8 Page 2
