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Authors: Rhys Bowen

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BOOK: Evan's Gate
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Evan noticed Watkins’s quick glance. “And where is he now?”
“I’ve no idea. If he did what he said he was going to do, he’s back in Russia by now—and good riddance, that’s what I say.”
“Your husband is Russian?”
“With a name like Sholokhov what did you think he was, bloody Welsh?”
“Is he a Russian national?”
“Do you mean does he have a British passport?” she said. “Not when he left me, he didn’t. He was granted asylum, but he didn’t like it here. He wanted to go home.”
“Mrs. Sholokhov,” Evan said gently.
She looked up at him. “Call me Shirley. I can’t stand that name. Bloody mouthful isn’t it?”
“Shirley, then,” Evan went on. “You don’t suspect that your husband has anything to do with this, do you?”
“He’d never do anything to hurt Ashley,” she said. “He adored Ashley.”
“Adored her enough to want to take her to Russia with him?” Watkins asked.
She stared out past them, and Evan could tell that this thought had crossed her mind before, however hard she had tried to suppress it. “I don’t want to think that,” she said. “I can’t believe he’d put her through something like this. He knows she’s been ill. He knows she needs me.”
“You got sole custody, I take it?” Watkins asked. “Did he have visitation rights?”
“Of course they gave me custody. I’m her mother, aren’t I? And we haven’t seen him in a while, so we thought he’d gone back to Russia.”
“How long?” Watkins asked.
She sucked in air through her teeth. “Several months now it’s been that we haven’t heard a peep out of him. Of course, we’ve moved around a bit since then—”
Again Evan saw Inspector Watkins give him the briefest of glances.
“I’ll want full particulars on him, Mrs. Sholokhov. A photo too, if you’ve got one. I have to treat this as a missing child case at the moment, but I’m going to stick my neck out and have all the ports of exit notified—just in case he decides to skip the country in a hurry with her.”
“All right.” She nodded.
“You’ve thought this all along, haven’t you?” Evan said quietly. “You didn’t want to think it, but you have.”
She nodded again. “I’ve been living in fear that he might come back and get her.”
“So why didn’t you tell the first policemen that came around this morning? They could have put out the word and maybe stopped him before he left the area.”
“I thought I was just panicking over nothing,” she said. “I’m not usually the type that gets het up. I stayed calm all the time Ashley had her operation. Tower of strength, that’s what people called me, and now I’m going to pieces because—” She pressed her hands to her mouth again, but this time she couldn’t stifle the sobs.
“It’s not too late,” Watkins said. “If he has got her, he can’t have left the country yet. Now you make yourself a nice cup of tea, and I’ll have a policewoman up here to keep you company in a jiffy. All right?”
She nodded mechanically again.
“And in the meantime, why don’t you write down all the details about your husband—his last address, what kind of car he drives …”
“Car he drives? Last time I saw him he didn’t even own a car. You don’t need one in London, do you, and we lived in Shepherd’s Bush.”
“So you’ve no idea what kind of car we should be looking for?”
“I just told you—we never owned one. If he wanted to get his hands on a car, I’m sure he could have borrowed one from his Russian mates. Proper little clique, they were.”
“If you have any phone numbers for any of his friends, you might want to give us those too,” Watkins said. “You don’t happen to have a photo of him in your wallet, do you?”
“Not bloody likely. I’ve no wish to remind myself about him, thank you.”
“So the marriage didn’t end amicably then?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Let’s just say we recognized it was a mistake for both of us. He didn’t want to stay in Britain, and I had no desire to go to Russia. Pretty hopeless, really, except I got Ashley out of it.”
“Right then. You put down anything you can think of that
might help us, and I’ll be back.” He headed for the door. “We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything at all. At least you know that he loves her, so she’s not likely to come to harm. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I hope so,” she said.
“We’ll send round the W.P.C. to stay with you,” Watkins said. “Do you have someone you could call to be with you in case this goes on a bit?”
She shook her head. “I’ve got a couple of mates in Leeds, but no real family anymore—just the one aunt in Yorkshire, and she’s too old to travel. I’ll be all right. I’m used to being on my own.”
Watkins pushed open the caravan door and stepped down onto the grass with Evan close behind him.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
Evan stared toward the beach. The sun had come out fully now, and there were a couple of boys flying a kite and a man walking a little white dog.
“Sounds to me as if it could be the father,” Evan said. “But why didn’t she tell us that sooner, especially since she thought she heard the sound of a car driving off?”
“I know. I get the feeling that she’s the kind of woman who doesn’t want to look a fool. She prided herself on being the tower of strength, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but where her child was concerned, who’d worry about whether they looked a fool or not?”
“I know,” Watkins said. “I’d run naked down the street if I thought someone had taken our Tiffany.”
“I’d like to see that,” Evan commented, and got a smile from Watkins.
“In a way I hope it is the father,” Watkins said. “Better than other alternatives.”
“I’d like to take another look at the beach,” Evan said. “It was strange how there was nothing to show where she had been, wasn’t it? I remember when I was a kid—I’d always build forts and ditches and collect odd things, but there was nothing.”
“The actual spot could be underwater by now. The tide’s coming in.”
“I know, but you’d think there might have been some signs of a scuffle if someone had snatched her, wouldn’t you?”
“Not if it was her dad. She might have gone willingly with him.”
“But he’d still have had to run to have cleared that beach before Mrs. Show-whatsit came back. I didn’t see any big, heavy footprints, did you?”
“I’m not an expert on sand,” Watkins said. “That stuff was pretty wet. I’d imagine footprints wouldn’t last long on the wet stuff and don’t make any impression at all on the softer sand.”
“So you still want me to do a thorough search of the caravan park?” Evan asked.
“Yes, we’d better cover all bases. Find out who was here and what they might have seen or heard. Oh, and check around and under the vans too—any bins or outbuildings.”
“Right.”
Watkins got out his mobile phone. “I’m getting on the blower to HQ so that they can notify the ports right away. Pity she didn’t know what kind of car he’d be driving. That’s going to make it tough. And I’d better have the search widened around here too. We’ll have our lads question people along the road to Criccieth and Borth-y-Gest. Someone might just have spotted a little girl in a passing car, especially if she didn’t want to be in it. She can’t just have disappeared, Evans. Somebody somewhere must have seen her.”
Henry Bosley-Thomas came out of the back door of the farmhouse and stood on the flagstone path, looking around him. The house was a solid square building of gray stone with white-trimmed windows, set amid lush meadows on the valley floor. In Henry’s memory the meadows had been full of sheep. Now they stood empty, apart from a small group of new lambs in a paddock near the house. Foot-and-mouth disease had all but wiped out the Welsh flocks—the Ministry of Agriculture extermination process had seen to that. Not that it concerned Henry too much. He’d always been a town boy, living in comfortable suburbia until he went to boarding school, and farm animals were just something picturesque to be observed from car windows. But he could see that his grandfather had been very cut up about it. He’d talked a lot about it the previous night, after they’d downed half a bottle of Glenfiddich together. This farm was his grandfather’s life—always had been.
Henry had been brought up to despise his grandfather. “Don’t say that Grandpa is a farmer, for goodness sake”—his parents’ voices echoed through his head—“say that he’s a country squire, if you like. Say he has a manor house in Wales, which he does, but not that he’s a sheep farmer.”
Both of old Tomos’s sons were ashamed of him, which was ironic when it was the prosperity of the sheep farm that had paid for their expensive educations. At public school they erased any trace of a Welsh accent and never mentioned family. Henry’s own father, Hugh, even hyphenated his last name to hint at a more distinguished ancestry. And they had raised their children with the same attitude. There had always been the yearly visit, which had been fun because of the cousins and the freedom, but his grandfather had always seemed a cold, remote figure, more interested in his farm than his grandchildren, never going in for hugs or games. Even when the tragedy had struck, he had shown no emotion, muttering something about sheep needing his attention and then stomping off in the direction of the hillside. It occurred to Henry that perhaps his grandfather had cared too much and didn’t want to let himself down by showing his feelings.
Henry realized also that this was probably a family trait. They hadn’t seen each other in—how many years was it now? All had gone their separate ways, all keeping to their own private grief and suspicions and fears. And now Grandpa had brought them back—issued a summons that couldn’t be refused.
Henry stood and scanned that hillside now. He remembered it full of dark blue uniforms, the barking of dogs, flashlights bobbing around in the dark. All that sitting and waiting—the empty, scared feeling and a throat so tight that food could not be swallowed. Even as he thought this, that same gnawing fear returned to eat at his stomach. He’d been suffering from ulcers recently, which he’d put down to job stress, but he remembered that the stomach pains had started long before he’d held any job.
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered to himself and deliberately set off over the stile and up the hillside track.
Evan left D.I. Watkins and was making for the nearest caravan when he glanced down at the beach again. That beach was worrying him. Maybe the mother had got the wrong spot. It would be easy enough, if she was in a panic. He decided to take one
more look for himself. He couldn’t believe that Ashley had vanished without leaving one single clue, even if it was only a couple of shells or a mound of seaweed. As he made his way back through the dunes, he saw the man with the little white dog and remembered that Mrs. Sholokhov had mentioned seeing him earlier. She’d also mentioned that Ashley was fond of the dog. It wouldn’t do any harm to question the man.
Before he could go in pursuit, however, the man spotted him, and came toward him.
“Are you with the police?” he asked, panting slightly with the exertion of walking over the soft sand. He was a genial-looking elderly man with the red face of one who enjoys his Scotch, dressed for the country in tweed jacket and tweedy trilby hat over white hair.
“Detective Constable Evans, sir.”
“Have they found her yet?” he asked. The voice was not Welsh, but it had the flat vowels of the south of England. “I heard that the little girl had gone missing.”
“Not yet, but we’ve got lots of people looking for her.”
“I hope they find her. Nice little thing.” He smiled. “I chatted with her a few times. Her mother said she’d been ill. She loved Trixie and she wanted to play with her, and her mother said it was okay in the open air.”
“Her mother said you were on the beach earlier this morning around the time Ashley vanished,” Evan said. “I wonder if you saw or heard anything unusual?”
“It wasn’t me.” The man shook his head vehemently. “This is my first time on the beach today. It was raining earlier and Trixie hates getting wet feet, so we stayed indoors until things had dried out a bit.”
“You weren’t on the beach at all this morning?”
“No, it couldn’t have been me she saw. Like I said, Trixie doesn’t like wet feet, do you, my love?”
The dog looked up with a silly grin and wagged her tail.
“Oh, I see. Well, that’s a pity,” Evan said. “We were hoping to find someone who might have seen Ashley.”
“I don’t imagine there would have been many people out on the beach this morning—it was blowing a gale out here. You should have seen the flag on my flagpole flapping. And this part of the coast is always quite deserted until the school holidays in August.”
“You live here year-round, do you, sir?”
The man shook his head. “No, I live in Essex. I come here occasionally to get away. I’m retired now so I can do pretty much what I like. I’ve rented one of the holiday bungalows about a mile down the road.” He looked back in the direction he had come and noticed two policemen crossing the dunes. “Look, if there’s anything I can do to help find her—anything at all—I’d be more than willing to be part of a search party. Trixie’s not a bloodhound but I’m sure she’d be willing to do her part too, wouldn’t you, old girl?”
The white dog wagged her stump of a tail. The old man raised his hat politely and went on his way, leaving Evan surveying the empty beach. He wandered around a few minutes longer but saw nothing but a long strand of seaweed, high above the waterline, that could have been trailed and then dropped there by a child, but how long ago he couldn’t say.
He stared back at the tops of the caravans, poking over the dunes, and shook his head. If someone had kidnapped Ashley, where had he hidden to watch for the moment when Shirley Sholokhov left her alone? The dunes were only gentle curves of sand and grasses here, none of them big enough to hide a man. How could Shirley not have noticed someone darting out across the beach as she made for the van? He tried an experiment, setting his stopwatch then running from the dunes to the water’s edge and back again. It took over a minute, and that was without the time necessary to grab a child. Could Shirley have been wrong about the amount of time she took? Evan wondered if she had not told the exact truth to them because she was feeling guilty. Maybe she
had paused at the caravan to light that cigarette and take a few puffs before heading down to the beach again. Maybe she hadn’t looked through the van window at all to notice that Ashley had gone. Satisfied that this made more sense, Evan stomped back through the dunes toward the caravans.
He started with the closest caravans, knocking on doors and then searching around them thoroughly. Most were still locked and uninhabited, with curtains drawn and dustbins empty. He stepped over gas cylinders that formed boundaries between each of the vans. The National Parks bloke had been right, he had to concede. They were a bloody eyesore. He wondered when he’d get time to do anything more about his cottage. He should get in touch with the listed buildings inspector right away and find a plumber to certify the sewage line and the septic tank. He decided that it would be sensible to cut costs by clearing the line to the tank himself. No sense in paying someone else to do the digging. If he ever got a day off, that would be the first thing he’d tackle.
Evan glanced at his watch. Three o’clock. That meant school would be over for the day. Bronwen knew he was meeting with the National Parks inspector today. She’d be waiting to hear the results. He took out his mobile phone and dialed her number.
“Finally,” she said, when she heard his voice. “I thought you might have stopped by at lunchtime to give me the news. I’ve been on the edge of my seat all afternoon. I found it so hard to concentrate that I said ‘Very good’ to Alud Davies when he told me that Peru was a soccer player. So what did the inspector say?”
“Still more hurdles ahead, I’m afraid, but not insurmountable ones. But listen,
cariad
,
I can’t talk now. I was called out on a case while we were up at the cottage. I’m down near Porthmadog. Little girl’s gone missing.”
“Oh, dear. Wandered off or what?”
“Not sure yet. Could be a case of abduction. It’s all rather strange and rather vague. I’ll tell you later. I just wanted to warn you in case I’m not back until late this evening.”
“All right. I’ll see you when I see you then, and you can give me all the news. Take care of yourself.”
Evan smiled as he pressed the off button. That was what he liked about Bronwen—never a fuss, always understanding. She was going to make a great policeman’s wife. He reacted as the words passed through his brain. It was still rather amazing to him that anybody was about to become his wife, that he was about to settle down with one woman for the rest of his life. At times he still went through momentary panic at the thought. But on the whole he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to spend the rest of his life with Bronwen. He shoved the phone back in its holder and went back to his task.
BOOK: Evan's Gate
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