Child's Play (2 page)
The wall behind McKenna was adorned with an old railway station clock and a roundel of police dress swords with burnished hilts and polished blades. He had put up the clock when the office became his on promotion, but the swords, like the portrait of a youthful-looking Queen which hung above the door, had been there as long as anyone at Bangor police station could remember. The large oak desk was tidily arranged with an outward-facing nameplate bearing the legend ‘Superintendent M. J. McKenna’, tiers of stacking file trays and a pristine, leather-backed blotter.
Systematically,
he was opening the mail he had gathered from his doormat before leaving home. There were leaflets, pamphlets, bank statements, telephone accounts, a reminder to renew his ‘adoption’ of four horses and two donkeys at an East Anglian sanctuary, a letter of thanks from Blue Cross Animal Hospitals for his last donation, and a hand-addressed envelope with a first-class stamp and a Carlisle postmark. The only person he knew in Carlisle was the man from whom he rented his house, who had moved there when his company closed their North Wales plant. He slit the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper.
Dear Mr McKenna
I’m terribly sorry to say that I’ll have to give you notice to quit the house. The council’s written to tell me the ongoing problems with subsidence can’t be rectified, so they’ve no option but to condemn the whole terrace, put out compulsory purchase orders, then demolish the lot. The structural engineers reckon one or more of the houses could just collapse without warning. If that happened, they’d fall right on to the High Street shops.
I
’ll be in touch right away when I’ve got more to tell you. Like I said, I’m really sorry, and I’m completely gutted myself about losing the house because I was looking forward to coming back when I retire, if not before.
Yours sincerely
David Madoc Jones
Feeling
almost queasy with shock, he reread the few terse paragraphs.
‘
Beautiful day, isn’t it?’ Jack Tuttle remarked, shouldering open the door. In one hand he carried two mugs of tea, in the other the morning’s official mail. ‘Going to be another scorcher,’ he added, putting his burdens on the desk. Then he saw the expression on McKenna’s face. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
McKenna
handed him the letter.
Jack
sat down, reading while he stirred sugar into his tea. ‘So? It’s not before time, if you want my opinion. That street of yours is a complete dump. Even Dewi Prys would turn up his nose at living there, and he’s born and bred on a council estate. You should’ve moved out ages ago.’
‘
I don’t want to move.’
‘
So you’ve said before. You’ll miss the views, you’ll miss the peace and quiet, and your cats’ll have to find somewhere else to do their marauding.’
‘
It’s not that—’ McKenna began.
‘
It’s not as if you can’t afford to buy a house, is it?’ Jack went on. ‘
Your
inflated salary would run to a swish pad in Beaumaris or elsewhere on Anglesey.’ He grinned fleetingly. ‘Only impoverished inspectors like me have to shoehorn their families into boxes on Bangor’s outskirts.’ Watching McKenna replace the letter in its envelope, he sighed. ‘You knew this was bound to happen sooner or later. That terrace has been clinging to the side of Bangor Mountain for nearly two hundred years and threatening to lose its grip for the past twenty at least. That’s why no one’s buying the houses when they come empty.’ Injecting a note of enforced cheeriness into his voice, he said, ‘Look on the bright side. You’re not tied into a chain and you’ve got plenty of time to look for somewhere.’
‘
I’ve got no choice, have I?’ McKenna said irritably, flicking the papers on the desk. ‘Anything urgent here?’
‘
Just a missing persons inquiry Divisional HQ routed straight to CID. It’s really something uniform should deal with, but I suspect there’s a bit of back-covering going on because the missing person happens to be one of the girls from the Hermitage. The headmistress reported it early this morning. The girl, Suzanne Melville by name, was last seen about eleven on Tuesday night, going from the showers to her bedroom.’
McKenna
looked up sharply. ‘That’s almost thirty-six hours ago.’
‘
Yes, but she’s seventeen,’ Jack responded mildly. ‘Dr Scott, the headmistress, was no doubt giving her time to come back under her own steam, which she may well yet do, with her tail between her legs, before the day’s out. So,’ he added, ‘how shall I handle it? Route it back to uniform, or waste valuable CID resources chasing some rich kid up hill and down dale?’
‘
Send Dewi. Depending on what he comes back with, we’ll take it from there.’
Jack
raised his eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for Janet Evans to go? You reckon her being a chapel minister’s daughter puts her near the top of the Welsh evolutionary tree, whereas Dewi’s knuckles still scrape the ground, as it were. Or, in other words, Janet’s posh and the Hermitage is certainly a very posh place.’
‘
And no doubt it’s also full to bursting with girls and women to whom the comely Janet could prove an intolerable distraction.’
Some
five miles outside Bangor, the Hermitage lay on the old Caernarfon road that had been rendered virtually obsolete when a bypass was blasted through the mountainside. With the disappearance of most of the traffic, the hedgerows and verges had returned to life, and driving along with Raybans obscuring his eyes, the car hood down and the sun blisteringly hot on his bare arms, Dewi thought he could well be on a country lane far from anywhere. His car was an unusual and quite rare Cavalier cabriolet that came into its own on days like this. When it rained, water leaked persistently through some deviously intractable chink between hood and windscreen.
He
drew up with a flourish on the gravel patch in front of the school gates, tooted the horn, switched off the engine and waited patiently for admission. The tall wrought-iron rectangles with their internal structure of more rectangles made, he thought, a determined geometric statement amid the unruliness of ivy-clad wall and overhanging trees. On a board fixed to the left-hand wall THE HERMITAGE was written elegantly in pale-blue Roman lettering on a dark-blue background, with the school motto, something unintelligible in Latin, on a furled banner beneath. The other wall bore warnings in bright-red on white: PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT and GUARD DOGS ON PATROL.
There
was a view through the gates of a cube-like little house, painted white, from which a middle-aged, ruddy-cheeked man emerged, a young German Shepherd at his heels. He eased open one of the gates, sidled through and approached the car. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked.
‘
By letting me in,’ Dewi replied good-naturedly.
‘
What’s your business?’
Dewi
flashed his identification. ‘Sergeant Prys, Bangor.’
‘
Ken Randall,’ the other man said. ‘How do?’
The
dog began circling the car and sniffing the tyres, then reared up and clamped its large, dusty paws on the top of the door, panting happily in Dewi’s face.
‘
Nice dog,’ Dewi commented, tweaking the animal’s ears. ‘Pet or guard dog?’
‘
Well,’ Randall began, smiling fondly at his four-legged companion, ‘he’s a bit of both, but to be truthful, really more of a pet. Anyway, there’s enough of the other around here already with the regular security guards. We just mind the lodge and let people in and out.’
‘
Who does that when you’re not here?’
‘
There’s an intercom. See?’ He pointed to a discreet box fixed on to the wall beside the gates. ‘The gates can operate either manually or electrically, so at night, or if I’m going out, I just flick a switch and them up there sees to things.’ He moved closer to the car and put his hand on the dog’s head. ‘Don’t mind me asking, but have you come about the girl who’s gone missing?’
‘
I have indeed.’
‘
Have you only just found out?’ he asked. When Dewi nodded, he said, ‘Well, to my mind, you should’ve been told yesterday, as soon as they knew she’d gone.’ Absently, he stroked the dog. ‘I told Dr Scott she should phone the police when she rang down here first thing asking if I’d seen the girl, but she just reminded me to mind my own business, like always. As it is, they wasted a whole day and, I dare say, half the night, footling around looking for her.’
‘
Do girls go missing often?’
‘
Don’t ask me,’ Randall replied acidly. ‘I don’t get to know a smidgen more than I need to do my job. Dr Scott plays things so close to her chest that if there
is
trouble at the big house, it’s done and dusted before anybody hears a whisper.’ He made a face. ‘She won’t like having her hand forced into bringing you here,’ he added. ‘I’d bear that in mind, if I were you.’
‘
Thanks for the advice,’ Dewi said. ‘This girl,’ he went on, ‘Suzanne Melville. D’you know her?’
‘
They call her Sukie,’ Randall told him. ‘I see her around on her horse, so I know what she looks like, but no more than that. We’re only allowed to speak to the girls if it’s a matter of life and death, as you might say.’
‘
OK.’ Dewi fired the engine. ‘I’d better get up there and see what’s what. Nice talking to you.’
Randall
smiled. ‘And you.’
While
he trotted to the gates and pushed them wide, his dog continued to hang over the door of Dewi’s car. After giving the animal’s ears a final tweak, Dewi sent him away and went roaring up the drive, dwindling figures of man and dog, framed by those peculiar gates, in the rear-view mirror.
The
drive ran straight for some hundred yards before making a sharp ninety-degree turn to the left. Another straight stretch ended in a ninety-degree switch to the right and after several more such switchbacks he began to wonder if the drive were not a surreal reflection of the gates.
He
had passed the Hermitage on countless occasions, but never before seen behind its twelve-foot-high granite walls. In the early 1920s, some of the ancient woodland through which he twisted and turned so perplexingly was cleared to build a sanatorium where the rich, the aristocratic, and even the royal, were incarcerated for protection from their own excesses. During the Second World War, officers destroyed by exposure to war were hidden there by the government, but by late 1950 it was home only to a small batch of husk-like creatures whose reason had been lost in the PoW camps of the Far East. When they made their final exit the Hermitage was effectively abandoned and nature proceeded to reclaim her own. Wind-blown seeds took root in the landscaped gardens, bramble, nettle and creeper snaked across the lawns to embrace the once-white walls, rhododendron ran riot and killed everything within their shade, while the building itself quietly decayed inside and out from cellar to roof. Ten years later a consortium of businessmen bought land and buildings at a knockdown price, refurbished and repaired, and once again opened the doors to the rich, the aristocratic and, occasionally, the royal, but now for their education.
The
branches overhead seemed to sag under their burden of foliage. Birds clacked and twittered, and shook the leaves, sending down little flurries of pollen and seeds that settled on the passenger seat, his shoulders and the gleaming black bonnet. More than once he had to stamp hard on the brake to avoid the rabbits that sprang from nowhere and the grey squirrels that stared at him, immobile, before shinning up the trees. But for all the heat of the day, there was a chill in the woods that raised goose bumps on his bared skin. He concentrated on negotiating the crazy drive and tried not to look too intently at the trees rooted in their purple shadows, in case it was not simply a trick of the light that made them appear to move. A horse chestnut suddenly thrust a great swatch of withering blossoms and leaf fronds in his face and lovingly caressed his throat before dropping the faint, sweet scent of decay on his clothes.
The
next ninety-degree bend brought into sight the flirtatiously swishing tail and pretty rump of a chestnut horse walking through the dappled shadows. The girl in the saddle had an equally fetching rear view. She glanced round as he approached and pulled the horse aside to let him pass.
He
drifted to a stop. Smiling, he removed his sunglasses and said, ‘Hi.’
‘
Hi, yourself.’ She smiled back. Her eyes were a deep violet and the hair coiled beneath her hard hat was like spun silk. Tight blue britches clung to her thighs.
‘
Lovely day, isn’t it?’ he offered.
‘
Isn’t it just?’ Her thighs tensed and the horse walked on.
He
let the car roll alongside. ‘Shouldn’t you be in lessons instead of out riding?’
‘
I guess, but this lady needs her exercise.’
Dewi
looked appraisingly at the horse, nodding sagely. ‘Nice animal.’
‘
Isn’t she? I wouldn’t mind her myself.’
‘
Oh? Don’t you have your own horse?’
‘
Hell, yes, Mr Nosy! I’ve got a palomino gelding called Tonto.’
‘
So why are you riding this one?’
‘
Because there’s no one else to do it.’
‘
I see.’ Still keeping pace, Dewi asked, ‘Is this Sukie Melville’s horse, then? I hear she’s gone missing.’
She
snagged the reins and the mare halted. ‘How d’you know about that?’ She frowned down at him.
‘
Your headmistress reported it. I’m a policeman. A detective, to be precise.’
‘
Is that a fact? And what do they call you?’
He
grinned. ‘Apart from “Mr Nosy”, you mean? My name’s Dewi Prys.’
‘
Say what?’
‘
Dewi Prys,’ he repeated. ‘D-E-W-I P-R-Y-S.’
She
mouthed the words, then shook her head. ‘I don’t understand your dialect.’
‘
Welsh isn’t a dialect, it’s a language. But never mind. You can call me David instead.’
She
urged on the mare. ‘So is D-E-W-I short for David?’
‘
Yep, but that’s my dad’s name. I got stuck with Dewi so people knew who they were talking about.’
‘
David’s much nicer, don’t you think?’ She looked him over. ‘Suits you better, I guess.’
Infuriatingly,
he blushed. ‘And what’s your name?’
She
laughed. ‘T-O-R-R-A-N-C-E F-U-S-E-L-I.’ With that, she turned into the woods and was lost from sight within seconds.
He
let the car coast along under its own momentum for several yards, then shook off his bemusement and touched the accelerator. Soon he was catching glimpses of the school, while sounds of human activity reached him lazily, as if all their energy had been absorbed by the heat and the trees. There were occasional shouts from girls at play, muted blasts from an umpire’s whistle, the chug of a motor mower somewhere ahead. As the drive opened up on to a forecourt, the mower passed across his field of vision, belching diesel fumes from the exhaust. The young man at the wheel was stripped to the waist. His muscles rippled, his tanned skin glistened with sweat and his coal-black hair was plastered to his skull, and he, too, disappeared into the trees while Dewi was still struggling to put a name to his face.
Sitting
on a slight rise, the school was a stark, flat-faced structure in dull white stucco, its three storeys defined by regimented rows of windows, its roof hidden by a parapet, its forecourt partially embraced by angular ornamental walls. Concrete fire escapes leaned against each end, like flying buttresses carrying the building’s weight to the ground. He parked the car, picked up his briefcase and walked towards the centrally placed double doors that provided the only visible access.
Inside,
the building smelt of stale cooking, mingled with the odour of freshly dried paint. He was in a white-painted central lobby and, looking down the corridors to right and left, saw that they too were white. The parquet floor in the right-hand corridor was dull and scuffed, that in the left polished almost to a mirror finish, while the walls along both were punctuated by heavy wooden door frames and plain wooden doors with iron knobs. Round, wrought-iron chandeliers hung from chains at intervals along the white ceilings, eight candle-shaped bulbs in each.
A
wide, shallow staircase with backless wooden treads and more angular ironwork overhung the lobby, and set in the large triangle the stairs made against the wall were the gates to a lift, their design another repetition of those at the end of the drive.
Stepping
rather gingerly on the shining parquet, he made his way along the left-hand corridor, reading the plates on the doors as he went: Miss G. Knight, Deputy Headmistress; Miss B. Grant, Senior Secretary; Dr Freya Scott, Headmistress; Miss E. Hardie, Matron. Flimsy-looking basket chairs sat outside every door, each precisely aligned with its neighbour. He passed the Bursar’s office and had just reached that of the Admissions Secretary when a sharp English voice cut the air behind him.
‘
Are you looking for someone?’
He
turned to see a lipsticked and befrocked figure outside the Senior Secretary’s door. She looked garish in that grimly minimalist setting.
He
walked towards her. ‘I’m here to see Dr Scott.’
‘
And you are?’ she sniffed.
‘
Detective Sergeant Prys from Bangor.’
She
pointed to one of the chairs. ‘You may wait there. Dr Scott is teaching until mid-morning break.’ The door shut in his face.
He
eased himself into the chair and, staring at his blurred reflection in the parquet, contemplated the school’s apparent lack of interest in the absentee. Even the gorgeous Torrance, with her charming smile and quaintly refined American accent, seemed little concerned. But then, he thought, perhaps this particular missing girl was only the latest in a long line. He rose and wandered back to the lobby.