A Place Of Safety (20 page)

‘But,’ Valentine put his cup down, ‘we do need to talk.’

‘Yes,’ said Louise, as the floor fell away beneath her chair. ‘I do see that.’

‘I spoke in anger, suggesting you move out. But I’ve thought about it and, you know, I still think it might be a good idea.’

‘Yes,’ said Louise again through stiff lips. ‘I . . . er . . . I’ve been thinking pretty much the same thing, actually. After all, I only came here temporarily, to lick my wounds, so to speak. And I’m feeling so much better now. Time I dived back into real life - or is it dove - before I ossify. I thought I’d rent somewhere between here and London while I look round for a place more permanent. It might take me a few days to get my things sorted. Is that OK?’

‘Oh, Lou.’ And Valentine put down his cup, reached out and took his sister’s hand. ‘Don’t cry.’

‘I remember when you first started calling me Lou.’ She had been twelve and head over heels entranced by a beautiful youth who was staying in their parents’ house. In her innocence Louise had believed him to be simply her brother’s friend. ‘It was when Carey Foster—’

‘Please. Not the “do you remember” game.’

‘Sorry. Below the belt?’

‘A bit.’

‘I can come and see you?’ Louise’s voice sounded strained and childish, even to herself. ‘And ring?’

‘Of course you can ring, idiot. And we’ll meet in town, like we always used to. Have lunch, go to the theatre.’

‘In town.’ She was being banished then. Louise sipped nearly cold coffee, sour on her tongue, and already the pain of separation began to make itself felt. Every cell in her body ached. ‘Yes. That would be lovely.’

 

After a quiet Sunday spent in the garden lifting and storing tulip and lily bulbs, splitting and replanting hardy perennials and cutting back summer-flowering shrubs, Barnaby prepared for his 8.30 a.m. briefing the next morning feeling physically relaxed and in a positive frame of mind. He made a note that a ten o’clock appointment with the Caritas Trust was listed in his desk diary.

Troy, who was waiting by the door trying to appear cool and alert, was chewing on a Twix. He had taken them up as a substitute for cigarettes and it was working pretty well except he was still smoking.

As Barnaby tapped his papers neatly end to end and slipped them into an envelope file, he frowned at the sight of his sergeant’s chomping jaws.

‘Don’t you ever stop eating?’ It was a sore point. No matter what Troy ate or how much of it, he never put on an ounce.

‘Certainly I do.’ Troy was aggrieved. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. First thing in the morning too. What was the old bugger going to be like by six o’clock?

‘I can’t imagine when.’

‘When I’m asleep. And also when I’m—’

‘Spare me the grisly details of your sex life, Sergeant.’

Troy maintained a dignified silence. He had been going to say, ‘When I’m reading to Talisa Leanne.’ He rolled the chocolate wrapper into a pellet and flicked it into the waste basket.

Thinking of his daughter reminded him of ‘chortling’. He had indeed looked the word up in her dictionary and found it to be a cross between chuckling and snorting. Pretty stupid, Troy decided. Why not the other way round? Hey, let’s hear it for the snucklers.

Everyone in Room 419 was sitting up and looking alert, notebooks open, print-outs everywhere. Only Inspector Carter appeared crumpled as if he hadn’t been to bed and rather depressed. Perversely, Barnaby decided to start with him.

‘Piss all, actually, sir,’ responded Carter, having been asked what he’d got. ‘We did a very thorough house-to-house in all three villages, going back in the evening to catch anyone at work during the day.’

‘And those who were in the pub?’

‘Oh, yes. No one seems to have heard any disturbance last Sunday night. All inside, curtains drawn, watching the telly. One person, a Mr . . . um . . . Gerry Lovatt was out walking his greyhound, Constanza, just yards from the weir at quarter to eleven and he heard nothing either.’

‘That is surprising,’ said Barnaby.

‘There was that lady—’

‘Yes, I’m coming to you, Phillips. Thanks very much.’

‘Sorry, Inspector.’

‘Carry on then.’

Constable Phillips’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously. He blushed and Sergeant Brierley gave him a kindly, encouraging smile. Troy, entranced simply by being in the same room with the girl he fancied rotten, sent his own smile winging across the desk tops. He had named his daughter’s kitten Audrey merely for the pleasure of constantly repeating her name. That ignored him as well. Maybe he should rechristen it Constanza.

‘A Miss Pleat,’ began Constable Phillips.

‘I’ve met Miss Pleat,’ said Barnaby. ‘You’re not telling me I’m going to meet her again, are you?’

‘Not necessarily, sir.’

‘Thank God for that.’

There was a certain amount of nervous laughter in which Constable Phillips laggardly joined.

‘Only I think she might have something. Not facts, I’m afraid, just ideas.’

‘Don’t tell me, the ebb and flow of the human heart?’

‘Something like that, sir. Well, she seems to think that Valentine Fainlight, the man in that amazing—’

‘I know who Fainlight is.’

‘Sorry. That he’s in love with the girl who ran away, Carlotta.’

‘Valentine Fainlight is a homosexual, Constable Phillips.’

‘Oh. I didn’t realise. Sor—’

‘On what does Miss Pleat base this remarkable assumption?’

‘He goes over to the Old Rectory night after night and stands looking up at her window.’

The room exchanged amused but slightly wary glances, holding back any vocal expression of mirth. Watching the chief, waiting to see which way the wind blew.

After a few moments during which he appeared lost in thought, Barnaby said, ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Constable Phillips, praying that it was.

‘Right. What’s next?’

Print-outs were consulted. Barnaby was informed that according to hospital and police information no person matching Carlotta Ryan’s description had been found dead, in or out of water, accidentally or on purpose, during the past seven days.

The search of the river bank was hardly fruitful. On the whole it was pristine but a rough patch of scrub and thorn bushes owned up to a few crisp packets and Cola cans, an old motor tyre once used as a swing and the frame of a baby’s pushchair. A retired brigadier, chairman of the Ferne Basset Conservation Society, presented himself at the search and began explaining that the ‘cess pit’ under observation was used as a dumping ground by council house tenants. It was cleared every week by a member of the Society and was promptly fouled again. Courteous requests to refrain from this habit had been ignored. He insisted that a note to this effect be added to the police report. Village pride was at stake.

Responses to the station’s television appeal were still being followed up. The usual attention seekers were being weeded out and what was left was not encouraging.

Sergeant Jimmy Agnew and WPC Muldoon, checking up on the background of Lionel Lawrence, had come up with what was surely the dullest CV on record. Born in 1941 in Uttoxeter, grammar school education with O levels in five subjects, including Religious Education. Dip. Theology at the Open University. Not even a suspicious passion for scouting.

DS Harris, detailed to lay his hands on the recording of the anonymous telephone call the night Carlotta disappeared, explained that Kidlington had a backlog, always being short-staffed on Sunday, but it would be over for sure later in the day.

As the DCI had feared, SOCO’s print check in the phone box at Ferne Basset proved that the whole procedure had been a pointless waste of their valuable time.

 

Barnaby was looking forward to meeting Ms Vivienne Calthrop of the Caritas Trust for the Resettlement of Young Offenders. He was about to talk not only to someone who had known Carlotta but who, with a bit of luck, might describe the girl from a reasonably disinterested viewpoint.

Lionel Lawrence, squinting and blinking behind his rose-tinted glasses, was worse than useless. Jax was full of spite because Carlotta had rejected him. Mrs Leathers resented the girl’s presence on behalf of her employer and Ann Lawrence had, so far, been unavailable.

They arrived ten minutes early and Troy took advantage of this by getting out of the car and striking up. He did so in a mood of bitter resentfulness both against himself and the bloody fags. So far Maureen still didn’t know he’d started again. Somehow or other he had managed not to do it in the house. A brisk walk before bedtime accounted for three saturating smokes and he just about held on till leaving the house the next morning. Gargling with mouthwash, ferociously brushing his teeth and chewing on a bag of parsley from Sainsbury’s seemed to have disguised this underhand activity so far. The fact that his clothes still reeked of nicotine was easily explained by their daily exposure to the tasteful ambience in the station toilets.

‘Come on!’

Troy stubbed out his cigarette and hurried after the chief. ‘Is it kosher, this place?’

They were mounting some heavily stained concrete steps then pushing through metal swing doors painted khaki. The paint was badly chipped and the right door caved in at the bottom as if someone had given it a good kicking.

‘Oh, yes. We checked it out. On their headed paper there’s a circuit judge noted for his interest in rehabilitation plus two members of the Howard League, as well as our Lionel. The funding’s from several impeccable philanthropic sources and a small amount comes from the government.’

At the end of a dreary corridor a large white notice announced Reception. The letters were very carefully written with a curly flourish here and there and bordered with brightly coloured flowers. The pinned-up card was enclosed in a transparent freezer bag.

A tiny, thin little girl was inside. She hardly looked old enough to go out to play, never mind run a switchboard. She had hair like canary feathers, silver rings through her eyebrows and a chirrupy little Cockney voice.

‘’Ello.’

‘Hello,’ said Barnaby, wondering what it signified when receptionists seemed to be getting younger all the time. ‘We’re—’

‘Miss Calthrop’s ten o’clock, right?’

‘That’s it,’ said Sergeant Troy. He was wondering if she had made the card on the door. ‘And you are?’

‘Cheryl. I’ll take you over.’

She ignored the phone which had just started to ring and led them out of the building and across the tarmac parking lot towards a rackety old Portacabin lifted from the ground on breeze blocks.

‘You don’t look much like a copper,’ said Cheryl, tripping along in absurd little boots with leopardskin cuffs and four-inch heels. She gave Sergeant Troy a friendly nudge.

‘What’re we supposed to look like then?’

‘Him.’ She jerked her soft, lemon-coloured curls towards the chief inspector lumbering along behind.

‘Catch me in twenty years,’ said Troy.

‘Nah,’ said Cheryl. ‘You ain’t never going to weigh that much. You ain’t the sort.’

They climbed three wobbly wooden steps. Cheryl rapped on an ill-fitting door. Immediately a wonderful humming sound, like the rich vibration of a viol, rippled under the door and ebbed and shimmered around their heads.

‘What was that?’ asked Barnaby.

‘She’s just saying come in.’ Cheryl skipped away, adding over her shoulder, ‘Deep breath and ’old your nose.’

The two policemen went inside.

Oh boy, thought Troy, inhaling deeply a one hundred per cent genuine gold-carat bred-in-the-bone fug. The wonderfully stale and putrid atmosphere, the concentrated essence of fag that tells an addict he has come home. Except home could never smell this good. Behind him Troy noted a muted moan of protest.

Barnaby, wishing he had indeed taken a deep breath, looked about him. There had been no attempt to disguise or decorate the walls. Metal frames and screws held together panels of hammered grey flat stuff which looked suspiciously like asbestos. There were old-fashioned metal filing cabinets though a dusty computer was just visible behind stacks of files on an extremely cluttered desk. An electric extractor fan let into one of the panels stuttered and coughed. Behind the desk, in a neat reversal of the usual no-smoking sign, a handmade effort had a glowing cigarette with a large, black tick drawn through it.

Someone had attempted to make the foul ambience less offensive by liberal squirtings with a sickly sweet freshener. This further clashed with the fragrance of monosodium glutamate from some takeaway empties in the waste basket and the bold, sultry perfume the woman behind the desk was wearing.

Vivienne Calthrop made no attempt to rise as the police presented their credentials, just glanced at the warrant cards and waved them away. Rising in any case would not have been easy for she was hugely overweight. She was, in fact, one of the largest women Barnaby had ever seen.

‘If you’d like coffee the gubbins is over there.’ She jerked a thumb first towards a white, rather dirty Formica table then at a couple of battered armchairs.

‘No . . . um . . . really . . .’ If Barnaby was thrown it was not because of the woman’s appearance but her truly remarkable voice. Very husky, extremely melodious, luxuriant and warm, it crackled with vitality. My God, thought the chief inspector, sinking into one of the armchairs, what my daughter wouldn’t give to sound like that.

‘Feel free to indulge,’ said Miss Calthrop, shaking a Gitane out of a cellophane-wrapped packet and lighting up.

‘Thank you,’ said Sergeant Troy, reaching inside his jacket before catching the chief’s eye and thinking better of it.

‘So, what’s all this about Carlotta?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve been told, Miss Calthrop—’

‘Next to nothing. Just that the police wanted some information on her background. What’s she done now?’