French Leave (26 page)

‘Let's talk outside,' he said, walking from the vast shed to one of the small grassy areas dotted around the base to soften the military austerity.

Miller followed, leaden-footed. ‘What's this about?'

Tom faced him, deciding there was no point in pussy-footing with this blunt man, who more than probably had to defend his daughter to his vindictive family, while privately despairing.

‘We have a witness who says Sharon was in a close relationship with John Smith before her accident.'

Miller's face suffused with ruddy colour. ‘Bring him here. Let him say it to my face and I'll shut his filthy mouth for good.'

‘You weren't aware of the relationship?'

‘
There was no relationship
! With that slimy, creepy bugger? Tell me who says there was and I'll soon put him wise.'

Tom changed direction. ‘Your wife told one of my team she's not Sharon's mother. Did you divorce the woman who is?'

Miller angled his head to look back at the Warriors parked in the shed, wiping his large hand over his mouth several times. ‘She died three hours after the baby was induced,' he said after a moment or two.

Tom waited silently.

‘We weren't married. She wasn't quite seventeen; I was in Bosnia. Her people kicked her out when she got pregnant, so she was living with mine. They looked after the kiddy until I married Molly.' He wiped his mouth again with his oily hand. A sign of stress. ‘It worked fine while her boys were small kids, although Sharon went through a jealous patch after being the centre of attention for five years.'

‘The boys aren't your sons?'

Miller shook his head. ‘Molly's ex set up house with another poof just after Pierce was born. Craig was at the same nursery as Sharon. That's how I met up with Molly. We both thought it would be a good arrangement, and Moll was taken with having a little girl.'

‘Now she's grown into a developing woman, which brings different problems. I know, I have three daughters.'

Still gazing at the sheds, Miller said, ‘The boys are getting interested in sex,
that's
the problem. Sharon's sixteen and she's not their sister. She's no blood relation, and they know it.'

‘So your daughter found someone more mature than the adolescent schoolboys she lives with. John Smith was shunned by every member of his platoon, so he found friendship with another person unhappy in her environment.'

Miller's head swung round. ‘
No
!'

‘Who was with Sharon when she attempted to walk along that wall?'

‘Who knows? A group of friends?'

‘The German witness saw only one man with her. A man who ran off when she fell. Mightn't he have been Smith? Isn't that the kind of cowardly act you'd expect of that “slimy, creepy bugger”?'

Miller stared at Tom for several moments as that idea took root. Then he said with quiet menace, ‘I'll kill him!'

‘Is that what you told him on the morning he vanished?'

‘What?' He seemed bewildered. ‘I was sick of his faffing around with his daysack straps while the rest went into action. I yelled at him that I'd sort him out good and proper at the end of that day.'

And Carr/Smith read something more sinister in those words, and ran. In Tom's mind facts began rapidly to click into place. The possibility of it being Carr who took fright when Sharon toppled from that bridge became a near certainty. Zoe Rogers lives next door to Sharon; she knew the girl was dating Carr. Zoe is the girlfriend of Jake, who is selling fully-packaged CDs and DVDs. Carr had a locker full of them. Jake Morgan has a Brummie accent.
Don't bother looking for Smith. Someone's finally done him in.
Had Jake taken over Carr's enterprise because he knew the young squaddie was dead?

Max was driving to the local hospital instead of seeking out Jake Morgan's father. Tom had called half an hour ago after his interview with Eric Miller, which had put a wholly different slant on the Carr case. Had they been investigating the wrong people? Did the answers lie not with 3 Platoon or, indeed, even with the West Wilts, but with a group of teens trading in a garden summerhouse? Max had been given the go-ahead to question Sharon Miller by the consultant dealing with her case. He had also agreed to Max's request for a nurse to be present throughout his visit. The appropriate adult.

Although deep in thought, Max was nevertheless aware of passing the apartment Clare was due to occupy at the end of next week. Pity. He would miss seeing her in the Mess. She provided a touch of feminine freshness amid the khaki-clad horde. It remained to be seen whether her titled Guards' officer would share it with her in a bid for reconciliation.

Sharon was in a side room, at the end of the ward in which Max had visited a corporal's son who had been attacked, prior to Christmas. A terrible tragedy had played out following that attack. One of the saddest cases Max had handled.

A nurse, busy in the ward, spotted him and came over. They went together into Sharon's room, after a swift warning in excellent English from the motherly woman that the patient had said she would not speak to any more policemen.

‘She is an unhappy girl, Colonel. I think it is at home that she feels very alone. Because she does not wish to return, she is pretending headaches and pain. You must understand her manners.'

Ignoring his amazingly fast promotion, Max was again reminded of the boy, Kevin, who had also done his best to prevent being sent home. No lover of hospitals, Max had done everything in his power to leave as soon as possible on the few occasions he had been ill. Having heard the reports from both Tom and Connie, it was easy to understand why the girl would be happier here than in a home dominated by a stepmother doting on two spoiled boys.

Sharon Miller was a very plain girl: straw-coloured hair with vivid pink stripes here and there, watery blue eyes and thin lips. Her arms and shoulders were bony; her breasts almost as flat as a boy's beneath the pyjama top. Her aggressive expression did nothing to enhance her looks. Would this girl be desperate enough for a boyfriend to cultivate the detested John Smith? Possibly. And would
he
be desperate enough to encourage her? That was what he was there to find out.

‘I
told
you I won't talk to any policemen,' Sharon shouted at the nurse, her face twisting in fury.

‘I don't particularly want to talk to you, either,' Max said equably. ‘Unfortunately, my job demands that I do.'

The scowl had been replaced by slight surprise. ‘You're not with the
Polizei
?'

Max shook his head. ‘Special Investigation Branch. We're trying to trace Private John Smith. We've been told he was your boyfriend.'

‘By that bitch, Zoe Rogers?'

‘Was he your boyfriend, Sharon?'

The girl angled her head to look through the window alongside her bed. ‘Never heard of him.'

‘He went missing during the exercise your dad took part in. He was in your dad's Warrior, but never came back in it. I'm sure you heard about that.'

She stared wordlessly from the window.

‘You don't recall your dad mentioning it; don't remember your friends discussing his sudden disappearance?'

‘I'm suffering from retrograde amnesia.' It was said with scathing pomposity.

‘Dating from when?' Max asked, already sensing he would lose this present battle. The hospital authorities, and the Army staff on the Joint Response Team who protected minors, would not allow him to persist in questioning her if she kept up this resistance. There was also the girl's father, who would swiftly launch a complaint of police persecution, he had no doubt.

‘From when I fell off the bridge.'

‘So you do remember doing that?'

She turned back to glare at him. ‘No, dimmo, they
told
me.'

‘Did they also tell you the man with you ran off and made no attempt to pull you from the river?' She continued to glare. ‘Did they tell you that man was John Smith?'

‘He wouldn't of run away,' she cried defensively.

‘Because he was fond of you?'

Recognizing her slip of the tongue, she turned back to the window. ‘If that John Smith you're talking about was a soldier, he wouldn't of run away from
anything
. I want you to go. I'm seriously ill, you know, and you're making my headache worse.'

‘Pity you've forgotten everything. From what I've been told, John was very fond of you, regarded you as his special girlfriend. He would want to share your suffering. If we could only discover where he is we could tell him you're seriously ill. He'd e-mail or text you.'

Suddenly and distressingly, she began to cry. ‘No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't care. Nobody cares.'

Pretending not to see the nurse's warning gesture, Max sat on the chair beside the bed, saying quietly, ‘Your father cares, Sharon. He told us about your mother, and how your grandparents looked after you for five years. Surely they care too.'

She swung round, face streaked with tears. ‘So why'd they let that cow have me? She's got those two monsters of her own, so why didn't Gran and Pop keep me? We were all right as we were.'

‘I can't answer those questions. Perhaps your dad needed someone to care for
him
.'

‘She doesn't. All she thinks of is those two ugly snots.'

‘So you spend as much time with your friends as you can?'

Tears flowed again. ‘They all hate me now. Say I've spoiled everything. It's not my fault he went. I wouldn't of sent him away. I just wouldn't of.'

Max could not ignore the nurse this time. She gripped his arm. ‘You must go. My patient is distressed. You have to leave.'

Seeing Sharon turn from a rude, aggressive girl into a desperately unhappy child, Max was again reminded of the boy in his earlier case. So often his investigations lifted the roof from a seemingly normal household to reveal unsuspected desires and resentments, which led to criminal activity. Ordinary people who had become dangerous when put together.

Lightly touching Sharon's hair in leaving, Max walked to his car thinking of Edward and Stella Smith, whose dead boy's identity had been taken by the son of a man who had abandoned him, and of a woman who was sinking to the depths of helplessness. Two houses in a row of others like them with no evidence of the tragedies within, yet he had had to uncover them. He was now on the brink of another in the Miller household.

Sharon had said her friends accused her of ‘spoiling everything'. Piercey's report on his second conversation with Zoe Rogers quoted that girl as saying Jake claimed Sharon had ‘spoiled everything' by falling in the river. Just how that made sense still had to be revealed. One thing was certain. Jack Carr had been involved with Jake and Co. in the sale of CDs and DVDs. The source of the goods, and the outlet for sales, had still to be discovered, but the clue to Carr's whereabouts was surely somewhere in that set-up.

Sharon would have to be questioned again. Max's instincts told him she held the key to this curious case. One of the women on his team – probably Connie Bush – would have to coax more from her, possibly in the company of a woman from the Joint Response Team. Useless for either parent to be present. They would simply agitate her beyond medical limits.

At the late afternoon briefing, Piercey was forced to admit he had been unsuccessful with Zoe Rogers. In the presence of her mother she had denied everything she had said about the Miller girl, and pretended she had no idea what he was talking about when asked if the J.S. mentioned was a private in the West Wilts named John Smith.

‘Never heard of him. Must've been someone else told you about J.S. Maybe when you were acting undercover,' she had added with wide-eyed innocence.

‘I don't think there's any doubt that these kids are running a scam in the Morgan summerhouse,' Piercey concluded. ‘Carr was involved, hence the comments that Sharon Miller had spoiled everything. They blame her for Carr's absence, yet she was in hospital when he took off.'

Tom came in on that. ‘We have a possible explanation for his abscondment.' He outlined what Eric Miller had revealed. ‘His threat to sort him out good and proper at the end of that day could have been seen by Carr as proof that Miller had discovered what he was up to with Sharon.'

‘And if Carr was the guy who ran off when Sharon fell from the bridge, he'd have additional cause to disappear,' put in Max. ‘From what we know of Carr he's always run rather than face the music.'

Tom then spoke of his interview with Kenneth Morgan, which had taken place while Max had driven to the hospital. ‘Far from deploring his son's choice of a career in the theatrical world, as some military fathers would, he's convinced Jake's a genius. Being REME, Captain Morgan is into things electrical. He enthused ad infinitum about the way Jake has turned a run-down summerhouse into an audio studio single-handed, and at his own expense. As far as the club is concerned, it was only set up by Jake and his pals a couple of weeks ago. Just after the great storm.' Glancing at them all, he said, ‘You'll realize the significance of that timescale. As soon as Carr was out of the picture, Jake stepped in.'

‘So they must know where Carr got the stuff,' said Heather.

Tom nodded at Beeny. ‘Any joy with your check on dodgy suppliers?'

He gave a faint smile. ‘Because they're dodgy, it's not easy to check them out. Drew a blank, sir.'

‘OK, understood. We may have to get what we need from the kids themselves.'

‘We'll have to tread carefully,' Max cautioned. ‘These kids aren't military personnel, although they come under our jurisdiction. I suggest we consider our options again on Monday. Meanwhile, I want you all to go on a pub crawl tomorrow night; check out anyone selling CDs or DVDs that fell off the back of a lorry. The weekend will give the kids the notion we've given up on them. They'll relax. More chance of catching them unprepared if we have no alternative but to solve this case through them.'