The Mushroom Man (4 page)

He was puffing like an asthmatic tuba player when he reached the belfry, and the pain in his chest had returned. Fortunately it was the wrong side for his heart. There was a walkway skirting the bells, with a handrail for extra safety. Nevertheless he kept a wary eye on the inverted tenor as he made his way to the bottom of the wooden ladder that led the last few feet up onto the roof.

The bolt in the trap door slid back easily, and a moment later the Reverend was outside, on the roof
of his tower. He’d only been up here a couple of times before. The noise was deafening. What had been a moderate breeze at ground level was a gale at this height. The flag material was slapping and cracking with a ferocity that seemed as if it would rip to shreds, and the ropes were lashing against the mast. First of all he wanted to admire the view. He’d heard that you could see Lincoln Cathedral from up here. He peered in the right direction in vain. A few degrees to the left the columns of steam from the Trent Valley power stations were plainly visible.

‘Twentieth-century cathedrals,’ said the vicar with distaste, and started pulling on the rope.

He untied the flag and bundled it into his arms – it was impossible to fold in the swirling wind. As he was walking towards the trapdoor a wayward corner flapped up across his face. He pulled it away with his hand, but this allowed another fold of material to fall to the floor. The Reverend Wilde’s right foot stepped on it and his left one became tangled in the beloved flag. He fell headlong into the open trap. His arms were enmeshed, so he could not use them to halt his progress, and he shot head first down the wooden steps, like a tobogganist down the Cresta run. Had there been anybody else in the church they would have heard the crack of his neck snapping as he hit the bottom, but there wasn’t.

Big Bernard Firth, captain of the team of
bell-ringers
at St Peter and St Paul’s, was last to arrive for their weekly practice session of the Exercise, as they called it. He unlocked the door to the ringing chamber with his personal key and they went in. One of the others switched on the spotlights that were fixed to the ceiling, bathing the floor of the room in a dramatic glow.

‘Right,’ said Bernard, ‘let’s not mess about, I’m thirsty already. You lot pull off and I’ll catch up.’

The other five began pulling on the ropes of the lighter bells, setting them swinging silently in the belfry. As they swung higher, almost reaching the vertical, the clappers struck the sides, causing them to sound. Soon they fell into the familiar rhythm. Bernard grasped the brightly coloured sally at the end of his rope and watched and listened for his cue to commence.

The vicar’s body lay on the Union Jack, on the
walk-way that skirted the bells. The wind had teased and pulled at the flag until a large portion of it was enveloping the wheel and rope of the tenor bell. Bernard Firth tightened his grip, recognised his opening, and pulled.

‘Bloody ’ell, it’s stiff,’ he cried, as the big bell came over the centre and started to fall, but without its usual urgency.

“Spect it’s full of pigeon shit,’ declared one of his colleagues.

‘Ask Gerry to tell old Joe to oil the bearings.’ suggested another.

‘What’s happened to Gerry? Nobody’s seen him for two days,’ stated a third.

At that moment the ceiling above them exploded.

For the briefest second they all saw the vicar hurtling out of the floodlights, Union Jack trailing behind, like a victorious Olympic sky diver on his lap of honour. Then he thudded, leadenly, onto the stone-flagged floor. They stood in a circle,
open-mouthed
and horrified, gazing at the broken heap at their centre, oblivious to the bells above them saying:
Dong-ding-dong…dong-a-dong…
ding-dong
…dong…dong…dong.

The search for little Georgina was fruitless and depressing. We conferred with other forces who had missing kids on their books but it was a futile exercise. Usually there was a car or a stranger
spotted near the scene of the disappearance, but we didn’t even have that. Most had occurred in rural areas or on quiet council estates, but this one had happened in the middle of town during the rush hour. Only the grief was the same. You can only put all your resources into a job like this for so long. The world doesn’t stand still while you look for a lost child. Slowly the urgency drains away as you run out of places to look, suspects to interview. Other crimes, some serious, demand attention, so you have to divert officers towards them. And every day that passes saps what little faith you had that you would find her alive.

Then the note came.

Dewhurst rang the office at eight in the morning to say that there was a ransom demand in his post. I told him not to touch it again and to wait. We were with him in ten minutes.

He’d opened the letter in the kitchen, standing at the worktop. It’s not the way I would have expected a businessman to conduct his affairs, but he said the envelope had caught his eye. Normally one glance tells him what’s inside, but he hadn’t recognised this one, so he’d opened it. It sounded reasonable. The address on the white self-sealing envelope was typed on a label. The note, lying alongside, had resumed its folded position. I smoothed it out, using my pen and a fingernail. It was composed of letters cut from newspapers and
glued to a sheet of white paper, like you see in TV thrillers, except that all the letters were of different sizes. It said:

Our tame forensic boffins are at Wetherton, about fifty miles away. I manoeuvred the letter and envelope into a plastic bag and labelled it CP4, with the date, while Sparky raised one of the Nigel Mansells in Traffic to rush it there. Then I rang Professor Van Rees and asked him to give it the full treatment.

Van Rees is a magician. Everywhere we go, everything we touch, we leave something behind and we take something with us. It’s called the Exchange Principle. A hair, a flake of skin or a bead of sweat; that’s all he needs. Eighty per cent of the human race are what’s known as secretors. They leak blood cells into their other body fluids. The letter was the first and only contact we’d had with Georgina’s kidnapper. With just a little piece of luck the Professor would be able to give us a genetic profile that would pick him out of a trillion zillion others. All we’d have to do was test them all.

‘How much does a DNA analysis cost?’ asked Sparky, as we drove back to the station.

‘Not much these days,’ I replied.

‘Could be just a nutter, jumping on the bandwagon, you know.’

‘Well, he’s still lowlife. He deserves to be behind bars.’

Sparky was silent for a while, except for the noise he makes when he clucks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He does it when he’s deep in thought.

‘What y’thinking?’ I asked.

He pondered for a moment, then said: ‘The note.’

‘What about it?’

‘It was odd. I want to see the photos when Traffic gets back to us.’

‘Yeah. I would have liked to have studied it more. What was odd about it?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve seen one or two similar ones, but that one frightened the willies out of me. I think it was meant to.’

‘You mean it was done for theatrical effect? Melodrama?’

‘Mmm, something like that.’

We were approaching a pub where we occasionally ate and imbibed. ‘Fancy an early lunch?’ I asked.

‘No thanks, Charlie. Wife’s packed me some sandwiches.’

‘Sugar! Looks like it’s the canteen again.’

We’d asked the lab to rush us some copies of the ransom note. As soon as the Traffic officer brought
them to me I distributed the prints to everyone concerned and sent the negative to our photographers to have some more made. Then I settled down to study it.

Sparky was right, and I could see why. A rational person wouldn’t normally communicate by cutting letters out of a newspaper and sticking them together again. But if he did, if he was just, say, halfway rational, then he’d probably use letters that were all approximately the same size. There are plenty to choose from in any paper. If he wanted a Q he might have to look for a little one somewhere in the text, but he should have no problems finding a decent-sized E or S.

But our man wasn’t even halfway rational. The note was comprised of letters that covered the full range of sizes available. Some out of the headlines, some from the smallest text. Four words – in, to, her and cash – were complete, cut directly from the little print. The overall effect was a sinister look that went far beyond the meaning of the message.

Or maybe I underestimated the author: maybe he was rational; maybe he knew exactly what he was doing.

I propped my copy of the note against the telephone and stared at it for several minutes, pencil hovering over a blank foolscap pad. The biggest letters were unusual. I’d studied lettering at art college, in my Age of Innocence, and could see that
the proportions were wrong. They were in the style of the Roman, or Trajan, alphabet, but the vertical lines were much too broad when compared to the classical proportions of the original. It would be reasonably simple to find which newspaper used a typeface like that. I copied them onto the virgin pad:

An anagram of MONEY. That wasn’t too difficult.

Several other letters were in the same style, but slightly smaller. I wrote them down. They were:

The X should be a giveaway. I said it to myself over and over again: X…X…X…How about EXPRESS? I wrote it on the pad.

It worked, but express had a surplus P. I carefully traced my pencil across the photo of the note. There was no P in it. The writer had no need for that letter. He’d obviously carved up the headings MONEY and EXPRESS before he’d set to work with the paste pot.

I looked through the window of my little room to see who was in the general office. Nigel was busy at his desk. I waved my arms above my head to attract his attention, but he stayed resolutely engrossed in whatever he was doing. Picking up the telephone to
speak to someone fifteen feet away represented the triumph of technology over humanity, and I was damned if I was going to be a party to it. I hurled my pencil at the pane of glass that separated us and he looked up.

‘You rang, boss?’ he said as he came through the door.

‘Yes. Does anyone in the office take the
Daily Express
, do you know?’

‘Well, yes. Everyone, I expect.’

‘Everyone?’ I echoed.

‘I’m not sure. Nearly everyone.’

‘Jesus,’ I sighed, sliding my notes and the photo across to him.

After he’d studied them for a few seconds, enlightenment flickered across his face. I said: ‘It looks as if he carved up those two words to make his note. If we put them back together and see what’s printed on the back, we should be able to pin down the edition he used.’

Nigel nodded his approval.

‘Which information,’ I continued, ‘will be about as illuminating as a cement lightbulb.’ It wasn’t exactly a piece of the jigsaw; more like just one of the broken-off joining bits. Blue, out of the sky.

I rang Professor Van Rees and told him what we’d found. After he’d finished his other tests he would fax the back of the words to the
Express
and see what they came up with. He was pessimistic about
his findings so far. The envelope and address label were self-adhesive; nobody had licked them. There were no fingerprints. It looked as if our man had worn a space suit when he made the note. I mentally moved astronauts further up the list of suspects.

Van Rees came back to me the next day, which was quicker than I’d expected. He hadn’t done any DNA analyses because there was nothing to analyse. The note was healthier than a bridegroom’s armpit. The only good news was that the
Express
had identified the issue. The kidnapper had cut the letters from a
Sunday Express
dated early April, six weeks before the kidnapping. The self-sealing envelope and the glue came from Woolworth’s, and there was nothing distinctive about the scissors he’d used.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t more to tell you, Mr Priest,’ Van Rees said. ‘The man you’re looking for has been painstakingly careful. I wish I could be more helpful.’

‘I’m sure you’ve done all you can, Professor,’ I replied. ‘And maybe you’ve told us more than you realise.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’

‘Well, maybe he’s so cautious because he has to be. He might be known to us. Perhaps he’s right under our noses.’

Some evidence would have been useful, though.

We didn’t need the big conference room for our meetings any more. Four of us sat in the small incident room we had been allocated, together with the civilian computer operator. The first team consisted of myself, DS Newley, DC Mad Maggie Madison, Dave Sparkington and Luke, our wizard of the keyboard. His terminal was linked to HOLMES, the national major inquiry computer. He had at his fingertips just about everything we knew about anyone. Ask him for information about, say, thefts of ladies’ knickers from washing lines, in Dorset, in the last five years, and he’d have a
print-out
for you in minutes. We had a mountain of them to prove it.

‘So he wrote the letter nearly three months before he posted it,’ said Maggie.

‘And two months before he did the kidnapping,’ added Nigel.

‘Yes. Unless he used an old newspaper from the pile under the sink. If you were making a note like this one, Dave, would you use any old paper or would you go out and buy one specially for the job?’

‘He bought it specially, together with a packet of envelopes, some blank paper and a stick of glue. No doubt about it.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘In that case, did he have anyone specific in mind when he wrote the note?’

‘Yes,’ replied Sparky. The other two nodded in agreement.

‘Because of the
her
in the note?’

More nods.

‘And the half-million,’ added Sparky. ‘I’d guess that’s about what Dewhurst could raise.’

‘What’s happening about the money, boss?’ asked Maggie.

‘Barclay’s are holding it for us and it’s being marked. It should be ready in good time.’

We’d had one reconstruction of Georgina’s last walk across the bus station, and talked about the possibility of another. None of us was optimistic.

‘C’mon, Luke,’ I said, trying to inject some enthusiasm into the team. ‘What does Sherlock say? Why not just ask it “Who did it?”’

He grinned. He was about half my age, and light years from all of us in style. When he first came to us Sparky asked him if he bought his clothes from a Punch and Judy man. He was good with the computer, though, and had a pleasant personality.

‘Did any of you see the late film last night?’ he asked. None of us had. ‘It was brilliant,’ he went on. ‘There was this FBI agent who was descended from Sioux Indians. When he had this difficult murder to solve he went out and listened to the wind, and the answer came to him.’

‘Thank you for that contribution, Luke,’ said Sparky. ‘It’s about as useful as anything else we’ve got so far.’

‘That’s true, I’m afraid,’ I agreed. ‘So what are we
all doing for the rest of the day?’ I looked at Nigel first.

He had some files from other forces that he wanted to look at again. They were about kidnappings that had gone unsolved and kidnappers who were back on the streets. Not too many of them, though – it’s not a British crime.

Maggie was our liaison with the family. Miles Dewhurst was burying himself in his work, but she tried to see him everyday, or at least talk to him on the phone. She saw more of Mrs Eaglin, Georgina’s grandma, and was giving her all the support she could. That was where she was going next.