Part 12 (1/2)

Maybridge, shocked by the discovery of the nightdress, would have agreed with Claxby had Simon not been involved. He didn't seem to have the temperament for it. You can't talk about gut feelings in this kind of situation, and he wasn't sure what his gut feelings were.

He hoped Simon was innocent, but hope is optimistic doubt, which isn't a professional state of mind. As a professional policeman he thought Simon should be brought in. He guessed that Rendcome, as a professional policeman, thought the same. Both he and Rendcome had memories of Simon's father, as had Claxby, but Claxby's memories didn't count. Nothing would colour his judgment. Maybridge looked for reasons that might delay the inevitable. ”So far,” he said cautiously, ”the evidence is circ.u.mstantial. I've never known the lad to be violent. I think we should wait a few days sir, and make further enquiries. The Mount is a psychiatric hospital. One of the patients, Paul Creggan, is due to be brought back from London tomorrow for questioning. He left the premises at the weekend.”

Rendcome, relieved, agreed that this seemed the best course. ”Meanwhile, young Bradshaw should be kept under surveillance. Un.o.btrusively.”

Claxby, slightly mollified by the proviso, said he'd see to it. Had Simon Bradshaw been the son of Joe Bloggs, he thought, he would be spending the night minus his shoelaces and tie as a guest of Her Majesty in a small room with bars on the window.

Simon, in David's large airy bedroom in Maybridge's home, replete after a substantial supper of roast lamb which he thought he wouldn't be able to eat but had surprised himself by being hungry (he hadn't, after all, eaten much all day), tossed and turned under the duvet and kept up a running conversation with himself inside his head. He should be out there looking for Sally. He had been told to stay put by the plain clothes policeman, the boss of the squad who had taken the nightdress away. But did he have to listen and take orders? Yes, obviously he had. But he'd come here. Organised searches by the villagers would be made; he might be able to join one of them. But that was leaving it late. The sky was starless tonight and there was a drizzle of rain on the window. If she were out there - under a bush - in a field - the rain falling on her - hurt - dying perhaps - and he was lying here - doing nothing - cold with guilt one minute, burning with shame the next- and he failed to stay awake and stopped thinking of her ...

Meg, looking in on him quietly just before her husband returned, saw that he was deeply asleep and she was reminded of David at the same age. Her son had had his traumas, too, but nothing this bad. She hoped to G.o.d the girl was all right.

Sally, drugged to her eyeb.a.l.l.s, was having the most-appalling dreams. In her last coherent state of mind she had threatened the old bag that if she didn't fetch her clothes soon she would walk back to The Mount naked. Mrs Mackay, not sure how Sally would take the news that the police were out looking for her, had been evasive when Sally had asked her what was happening. It took time before people began worrying, she soothed. In a few days Sally's feet would be healed and she would return to The Mount and carry on as usual. A meeting with Mrs Hixon in a cafe near Horfield Gaol in Bristol had convinced Mrs Mackay that she was doing the right thing. The suffering of Bradshaw's son would be nothing compared to the suffering of her husband, she had pointed out. Her husband was in for life. Simon Bradshaw was just getting a small taste of misery. When he had suffered enough it would end. As for Mrs Mackay's worry about the illegality of the situation - laws were man made. Nemesis, the G.o.ddess of retributive justice, was above human law. ”And you care for the girl, don't you?” she had asked, smiling coyly. ”Who better could look after her until she is well? Do you suppose it was by chance that she found her way to you on Friday night? Believe me, she was guided to you by the Divine Will. A precious being has been placed in your charge. Mould her. Pray for her. Then send her forth when she's beautiful in flesh and mind and spirit.”

A tall order.

Mrs Mackay bought Dettol for Sally's feet (her nose and forehead had healed). Her mind and spirit she couldn't do much about apart from keeping her quiet with a c.o.c.ktail of barbiturates dissolved in the most tasty of soups. When the squad of police failed to do a spot check inside the cottage and satisfied themselves with a routine enquiry at the door followed by a look inside the coalhouse in the back yard, she became convinced that Mrs Hixon was right. Had it been part of the Great Scheme of Things for Sally to be found, she would have been then. ”You'll soon be better, m'love,” she told her when Sally tried to get downstairs on legs that felt like nerveless pieces of plastic, and the floor and ceiling splintered into hard black squares and triangles that tended to come up and hit her. She guided her gently back to bed and arranged a couple of bolsters on either side of her. ”To make you comfy, m'dear.” As going to the lavatory didn't seem safe unless she was there to help her, she left a commode and toilet paper in the bedroom, and locked the door.

Sally, not drugged, would have broken the window. And yelled. And kept on yelling until someone came. She would have saved herself eventually.

But Sally slept.

Having a row with Meg and making Simon get up at dawn and go home were two emotionally bruising experiences for Maybridge - especially the latter.

He had tried to point out calmly to the boy that as a policeman he had to observe certain rules of professional behaviour and having him there put him in an invidious position. He couldn't tell him he was under surveillance. ”If I'm seen to be helping you too openly, then I can't help you at all. Superintendent Claxby will be taking over from me in all further interviews with you - on the orders of the Chief Constable. I'm sorry about this, but I haven't any say in the matter.” Later, he had broken a few rules of confidentiality by telling Meg about the build-up of evidence against Simon. She had listened in silence, deeply perturbed, and her anger with him abated. ”The happiest day of my life,” she said sadly, ”will be the day of your retirement.” His, too, on occasions such as this. There were times when he wondered why he had chosen the profession.

Paul Creggan's moods of dark disillusionment with his job came and went, but he ran his multi-million-pound business with considerable skill. He attributed his success to his ac.u.men in choosing the right female staff. It was, after all, a feminine product that was on sale - apart from Citre - and Citre was bought by women for men, according to a survey he'd had done. Very few men bought the product for themselves. The full range of perfumes sold under the Redolence logo were to be found in salons within the large better cla.s.s stores up and down the country. His senior executives, all women and London based, were well paid, well educated, well groomed and well motivated. The perfume industry rolled along on well oiled wheels, gathering momentum, and caused him no ha.s.sle. It was one hundred percent legitimate.

The aromatic oiling of the wheels of the Patchouli Parlours, however, needed watching. It tended at times to clog. It had clogged badly when Hixon had murdered one of his girls. She had broken all the rules and might have broken his business if the police had probed a little deeper. The ponce, a nasty little geezer who ran a similar establishment in Bath, had lured her. And she had moon-lighted.

The Patchouli Parlours might not be as white as driven snow but they were elegant places to work in and the girls, carefully chosen, weren't coerced into doing anything they didn't want to do. If they showed particular apt.i.tude in attracting male customers for aromatherapy plus extras they were rewarded with a flat above the premises - free. If intake fell, they lost the flat. While the flat was theirs they were promoted to managerial status and wore a brooch in the shape of the letter M. That M might also stand for Madam amused some of the livelier ones. The French version - Madame - one of them suggested had a ring of cla.s.s about it - so why not use it? When Hixon had started his lethal campaign the jokes had stopped. The business had slumped, too. Understandably. The inc.u.mbents had kept their flats - and status - it wasn't their fault. Business, now that Hixon was safely locked away, was booming again.

There were times when Creggan saw himself blackly as King Rat and wished he could chuck it all in, but it would take someone with the funds and ability of an emperor rat to buy it. Such men existed but to find them you had to trawl in deep waters and perhaps finish up drowned. In his darkest moments he imagined himself at the bottom of a tarn in a quiet dun coloured landscape where sheep safely grazed and only entrepreneurs perished. These moods tended to come upon him when he was undergoing ma.s.sage with aromatic oils in his regular Gestapo surveillance visits to the Parlours outside London. He hated the smell. He could smell the b.l.o.o.d.y stuff for hours. It clogged his pores. Got into his clothes. Clung.

He had suggested to his wife, the blonde b.i.t.c.h on his back, that the Parlours should be closed - not sold - closed. Finished with. But she had pointed out that a move as unbusiness-like as that would invite investigation and she didn't see why she should suffer financially for his unpredictable conscience. ”Take your holiday,” she had urged, ”wear your sackcloth and ashes for a while, and come back when you're normal.”

He was normal when he lived in the tepee.

He was gra.s.s-roots normal there.

He wished he would live in it for ever.

To be peremptorily summoned back to it by the police, however, was a bit of a shock.

Maybridge conducted the interview in Donaldson's office, and as Paul Creggan was, or had been, a patient, Donaldson was sitting in on it. It looked like a role reversal situation. It was Donaldson who seemed sick with nerves. He couldn't keep his hands still and seemed to be having an intense psychotic relations.h.i.+p with a carafe of what looked like water. It mesmerised him. If it contained what Maybridge thought it contained, then he wished he'd take a swig of it and calm down. It was understandable that he should worry that one of his staff was missing, but surely he shouldn't be this worried.

Creggan's leaving Macklestone at the vital time had placed the focus on him temporarily. Creggan under the spotlight wasn't blinking. He was extremely bland. And extremely well groomed. The erstwhile tramp-like individual wore a Savile Row suit, Gucchi shoes, and smelt of roses.

Maybridge offered him a cigarette.

Creggan declined. He indulged in the occasional cigar and wished he had one with him now. Cigars had a good strong smell. So had carbolic soap. He had arrived without having had time to bathe or change his underwear. His Daimler in the car park made the kind of statement he usually tried to avoid and stank with exotic fragrance. He had told his chauffeur to open all the windows and take a stroll around the grounds and if the d.a.m.ned car was stolen then so be it. He might not be going back. He didn't know why he was here.

Maybridge told him.

Creggan was surprised but not immediately perturbed. He had expected this to be a business investigation, though on reflection that would have been conducted in his head office in Regent Street. He had half-hoped that it might have something to do with Susan Martin, the fifth Rapunzel, that her true ident.i.ty might have been discovered. That his little Sally Loreto had skipped off somewhere didn't alarm him. His alarm might grow as time went on, but he'd had no close link with her. Not like the other one.

”Tell me more,” he said suavely, ”and how you think I might help you.”

Maybridge gave him the outline but Creggan's section must be mapped in by him. ”She was seen at the Avon Arms on Friday evening. She didn't come back to The Mount. You were in your tent here on Friday evening and left on Sat.u.r.day morning. Tell me about your movements up to today.”

Creggan's movements were as innocent as Simon's. He had walked his dog at around midnight before clouds obscured the moon, but under the circ.u.mstances it might be unwise to admit it. He said he'd slept all night. He had phoned his wife on Sat.u.r.day morning and decided to go home for a while. He felt rested enough to carry on with his business affairs again. If this were the kind of enquiry in which alibis were necessary then he could write Maybridge a list of people he'd been with so that Maybridge could check.

Maybridge suggested he should do so. ”But Mr Millington told me that you collected your dog and walked it on Friday night. Please explain that first.”

Creggan apologised. He said he'd forgotten. ”Doctor Donaldson will vouch that my memory isn't all it should be.”

Maybridge looked at Donaldson. Donaldson looked at his carafe. Silence. ”Well?” Maybridge prompted.

Donaldson said vaguely that Mr Creggan's medication might have blurred his memory a little. And then remembered belatedly that Creggan had no medication whatsoever. A lapse of concentration. He had more important things to worry about. Someone somewhere was having access to a lethal dose of tranquillisers. A recent check in the pharmacy showed that the pilfering had been done at random by someone with no medical knowledge and probably in a hurry - a few pills of this and that - not all benzodiazepines, some a lot stronger. A patient could have stolen the key. His own investigation was being hampered by this one. It should be reported to the police now. If someone was poisoned he would be held responsible.

He forced his attention back to the interview. Creggan was saying that Millington had been perfectly correct to state that he had walked his dog on the night in question. He remembered it now very clearly. He also remembered meeting Millington late one night in Craxley Copse a few weeks ago. Millington had been blocking badger holes so that foxes couldn't escape the hounds by hiding in them. He was presumably being paid for this by the Master of Fox Hounds. Dwindling farm profits had bizarre consequences.

Maybridge, not sure if Creggan was devious or just uncaring about Sally, knew that in this instance he was deflecting attention from himself. Millington took night walks, too. Okay, point made. Bradshaw had had a stand up row with Millington about messing up the badger setts, or something equally unlikely for a man who liked to hunt. Past history. Maybridge had forgotten the episode until now. He brought Creggan back to the present. ”Have you ever seen Sally - off the premises - walking on her own or with someone else? In the copse, maybe? Anywhere?” He wasn't loading the question against Creggan. He didn't think he would be sufficiently indiscreet to carry on with the girl openly, or admit to it if he had. But he might have seen her with someone else. Not Simon. He had questioned Mrs Mackay along the same lines, with no luck.

Craxley Copse was very evocative for Creggan - an area of some beauty and of great gloom. He could smell the place - damp leaves - fir cones. In no way ever did he a.s.sociate it with Sally, but it was a place of death and Sally was missing. He began to feel more concern for her. His natural caution nudged him to be careful but he had been careful a long time, disa.s.sociating himself when he should have come forward and told the police what he knew. The two cases were very different, the odds against Sally's demise were high, even so one could never be sure. He had seen her with Bradshaw's son.

”Tell me,” Maybridge urged, aware instinctively that Creggan might be holding something back, but hesitant.

Creggan let the words come - slowly and carefully. He didn't look at either Maybridge or Donaldson as he spoke, he saw a wider audience in his mind's eye. And he saw her. Not Sally. ”She worked under a different name from her own,” he said, ”most do. I knew her background - most don't. She was one of my employees - a good one. She had a flat on the premises. Her parents were Canadian, she told me, but she was born over here. Her parents went back to Vancouver. She stayed. When she got tired of the aromatherapy business she worked for an escort agency - no, not the kind you think - she escorted children to and from boarding school when the parents were abroad. In between she took jobs as a temporary nanny or housekeeper. Ask Simon Bradshaw about her. She fell and broke her wrist when she was playing tennis one day with him and his father when his mother was away. She played other games with the professor, too, on and off over the years. If the corpse in Craxley Copse had a damaged hand then you can call her Susan Martin if you want to. But it wouldn't please her. She had stopped being Susan Martin a long time. She was christened Trudy Morrison and she's a lot older than the date on the gravestone. How the professor could get away with that sort of deception I don't know, but he did. If you don't believe me, disinter the body and let Cormack look at her hands.”

Maybridge drew deeply on his cigarette and the silence grew. He had been pushed back in time and all the niggling anxieties he had managed to subdue were painfully present again. Both of the skeleton's hands had been severed. Too neatly, according to Radwell, who had been the first to discover her, to have been done by an animal.

He looked over at Donaldson but Donaldson was intent on pouring a stiff drink of vodka into a gla.s.s. Some of it spilled.

Creggan, master of the situation, temporarily and perhaps perilously, felt a surge of pure relief. Potent as champagne. His unpredictable conscience had probably smashed his empire if Maybridge took what he said seriously and began probing. Either way he felt less of a King Rat. Trudy had been a warm, loving member of the human race. A pretty long-haired Rapunzel that he guessed Hixon had never met. He had handed her ident.i.ty back to her. A small gift too long delayed.

”Bull s.h.i.+t!” Donaldson stood up. He had been badly shaken and controlling his anger was difficult, but it was necessary to a.s.sume the therapist role and take command. ”This is an investigation into the disappearance of Sally Loreto, Mr Creggan. We don't want to hear a fanciful farrago of nonsense about a dead prost.i.tute.” He addressed Maybridge. ”I think it would be better if you deferred your talk with my patient until he's in a more rational frame of mind.”

Or you are, Maybridge thought, or both of us. He didn't know what to say or do and was grateful for a respite. He would report it to Claxby and Claxby would tell Rendcome who might let the matter lie. It was up to him. For Simon's sake he hoped that Creggan was truly out of his mind. He looked at him thoughtfully. Creggan, genuinely amused, smiled. He seemed alarmingly sane.

Anger makes you strong, Simon discovered, and he was getting very angry indeed. When Maybridge had made him get up and go home at a time in the morning he had never seen before, he had felt like weeping. Maybridge hadn't looked happy either. To be deserted by the one person you thought was okay, even though that person came out with what sounded like reasonable excuses, was wounding. To be thought capable of killing Sally and burying her in the garden was worse. It was b.l.o.o.d.y insulting.

And everyone seemed to think it - even Meg. She kept visiting and she brought him food so that he always had something in the fridge, but she looked at him as if she wasn't quite sure about him and hated herself for not being sure. He told her rather truculently that he wasn't in the habit of doing people in, and if Sally turned up dead it wasn't his fault. It sounded brutal, as if he really were capable of killing her. But he did care what happened to her. He was sick with worry about her. Not selfishly sick - though he was that, too - probably a mixture of both. Meg had tried to soothe him, and even put her arm around his shoulder and given him a swift kiss. ”Don't worry, kiddo - everything will work out okay, you'll see.” The brief show of affection had cooled his anger and brought tears - not shed, luckily. She had gone quickly, perhaps aware that they might be.