End in Tears (10 page)

John Brooks's car was parked against the curb and there was a mist of dew on its windscreen. It was not quite seven o'clock.

She had come alone, having a very unfeminist idea—a very incongruous idea for an ambitious detective sergeant—that she couldn't fetch Bal out at this hour when he had bought her two Camparis and soda the evening before, abstained from alcohol himself to drive her home and, parting from her, given her a gentle kiss on the cheek. She could have phoned Brooks but, having done so several times in the past days, she was sure an answering machine would be on and no one would return calls made to it. She rang the doorbell, but no one came. She rapped the knocker, rang again and this time a young man with wet dark curly hair and a boyish face came to the door.

He held a towel in his hand and was rubbing his hair with it as he spoke. “Who are you, at this hour?”

“Detective Sergeant Goldsmith, Mr. Brooks.” Hannah produced her warrant card and set one foot over the threshold. “I'd like to speak to you and you're a difficult man to catch.”

“You want to speak to me
now
? I'm just leaving for work.”

“I need to speak to you as a matter of urgency.” She could hear her voice growing cold and sharp. “Preferably now, but if that's impossible I'd like to make an appointment to do so as soon as possible. I'll leave you with one point to consider until we meet again. Information has reached us that you're in the habit of going out in your car by night—in the middle of the night or before dawn, that is.”

“It's a lie.”

“Very well, but we need to talk about it. I suggest this evening at seven-thirty.”

He said nothing, nodded, then shrugged.

“Mr. Brooks?”

“Oh, all right. It's not really convenient, though.”

“It's convenient for me,” said Hannah and went back to her car. She drove to the corner and waited, pretending to be reading her notebook. Within five minutes Brooks passed her in his car, heading for Kingsmarkham.

Her business skills course, at a breakaway department of the old Stowerton polytechnic, Lara Bartlow took very seriously. In the living room of the housing association flat she had shared with Sandra alone until Lee Warner moved in, she was putting folders and books into a new briefcase when Wexford and DS Goldsmith arrived. Warner was nowhere to be seen, was probably still in bed. A strong smell of frying bacon pervaded the place. Lara's clothes were businesslike, a black trouser suit with white shirt and “sensible” flat-heeled shoes. Instead of the voice he had anticipated came a sixth-form-waiting-for-A-levels accent. If it had been her with whom Amber had gone on holiday he would have been less surprised, but it had been the sister, girlfriend of Keith Prinsip…Still, it hadn't been a holiday, had it? More in the nature of a business trip.

“I don't want to be late” were her first words.

“We'll drive you to your college, Ms. Bartlow,” Hannah hastened to reassure her. “It's not a police car.”

No strangers to the police, he was sure, the Bartlow-Lapper-Warner family would have lived on the fringes of petty crime for the girls' lifetimes and more: a little shoplifting, a good deal of expert benefit fraud, driving without insurance, that sort of thing. Respectability for Lara probably consisted in not being seen anywhere in the vicinity of one of the Mid-Sussex Constabulary's turquoise-blue and flamingo-red checkered vehicles. Yet perhaps he was being unfair. This girl was plainly, to use an old-fashioned term, pulling herself up by her bootstraps. He asked her how she came to know Amber Marshalson.

“We were at school together.”

“Ben Miller was there too?”

“That's right. They're a bunch of snobs around here, but Amber had no side to her. If it didn't sound daft in this day and age, she's what my nan calls a real lady. It broke my heart when I'd heard what happened to her.”

“It was through you,” said Wexford, “that she met your sister Megan?”

“Yeah, that's right. She came to the Bling-Bling Club with me one night, and Amber was there. Just her, not that Keith.” She hesitated, said, “Look, Megan'd be okay once she got away from him.”

She's got away from him now, Wexford thought sadly. “You don't care for him?”

“Layabout scumbag,” said Lara savagely. “He's dragged her down. He's got her doing things she'd not have dreamt of when she was with Mum and me.”

“What kind of things?”

“You want to know, you ask her. I'm not telling on my sister. And I've got to get to college—like now.”

As they went down to the car, he reflected that asking her was the one thing he couldn't do. Already the heat was beginning, the temperature palpably rising, the air calm and still, the leaves on the pavement trees hanging limp. The night hadn't been long enough or damp enough to revive them.

It was Hannah who asked, “Why did she and Amber go to Frankfurt?”

“Don't ask me. Maybe there was a cut-price flight or something.”

“Where do you think your sister is now, Lara?”

“Gone off with someone she's met and left that Keith, I hope.”

“If you're serious,” said Wexford, “would she do that and not get in touch with you or your mother?”

“We're here. This is my college.” Lara got out of the car, Wexford noticed, in a way women rarely do today, but the most elegant way. Her knees pressed together, she swung both legs off the seat, put her feet to the ground and stood up, all in one graceful movement. “Look, she just might. I mean, she's not said anything to me about another bloke, but that's how she got together with Keith. She was seeing this really nice guy, and good-looking too, wow, like Jude Law, and then one day she just…well, disappeared. Turned up, oh, four or five days later with that Keith in tow. She'd got a week off work and she'd gone to Brighton on her own and she found him—in the gutter, I reckon—and brought him back. That was three years ago.”

They watched her walk into the building up a flight of steps, a tall, assured sort of girl who knew where she was going and how she meant to get there.

“Now we have to start the search for her sister,” said Wexford.

CHAPTER 12

B
al was more than willing to come with her. Of course, strictly speaking, he had to come if she told him to, but she knew real enthusiasm when she saw it. He wasn't accompanying her because it was his duty but because he liked her company and—she was pretty sure—found her sexually attractive. Well, she
was,
she had no difficulty in telling herself, as she went into the women officers' washroom, combed her long hair, sprayed on a little Chanel Chance and applied lip gloss. As a large number of men had told her, she was extremely good-looking. Moreover, she belonged to a type Bal might be expected specially to admire. With her olive skin, dark brown eyes, and dark chestnut hair, she could be taken for a woman of Indian origin—well, very far north Indian. Now, Hannah, she murmured to herself, that's close to racist.

She passed on tiptoe through the conference room as Wexford was addressing the media. There was no other way out. His appeal was going out live on the six-thirty regional news. She heard him say, “Megan Bartlow has now been missing for more than forty-eight hours. We have serious fears for her safety. If anyone has…”

Closing the door silently behind her, Hannah went out into the still brilliant, still dazzling light of another hot evening to find Baljinder Bhattacharya waiting for her at the wheel of his car. As soon as he saw her he was out of the driver's seat and over on her side to open the passenger door. If we hadn't got to do this, she thought, we could go somewhere nice to drink and eat, not bloody Brimhurst Prideaux, maybe sit out in the moonlight—not that I'd need moonlight—and I bet we'd be in bed in my flat by ten. Oh, I do like a thin man with a concave belly and a profile like a hawk winging its way across the plains of the Punjab…Come on, Hannah, get yourself together. She got into the car.

John Brooks's red VW was nowhere to be seen but there was nothing surprising in that. It was still only ten to seven. Hannah rang the bell and Gwenda Brooks came to the door. She had a what-is-it-now look on her face.

“It's your husband we want to speak to.”

“He'll be a good half hour yet.”

“We'll come in and wait,” said Hannah in her sharp tone. “He expects us. I made an appointment with him”—she looked at her watch—“twelve hours ago.”

It seemed to be the first Gwenda Brooks had heard of it, but she stood back to let Hannah and Bal pass through and showed them into a living room they had been in before. Mrs. Brooks was one of those women who dislike ornaments and pictures because they need dusting and was fond of beige as a furnishing color. It was the shade of carpet, three-piece suite, woodwork, and wallpaper, its tone slightly varying between shortbread and caffè latte.

The windows were wide open onto a small garden, which had once had a lawn. This had been recently covered by a wooden deck, more suited to a Malibu beach house than a Sussex cottage. In the very narrow borders surrounding it grew a few dispirited, flowerless evergreens. Hannah, who was usually less aware of beautiful scenery than beautiful men, found herself thinking that, no matter what they had done to house and garden, the Brookses hadn't been able to lay a chilling beige hand on the splendid landscape of wooded hills beyond their back fence.

Gwenda Brooks didn't offer them anything. Somewhere a radio was playing very softly, not music but a male voice apparently giving a lecture. Perhaps Gwenda couldn't bear silence. Any background noise was better than none. She had been reading, or looking at, a glossy magazine before they arrived and now returned to her perusal of a double-page spread of photographs of a house, rooms, and garden.

Perhaps it struck her that this was impolite, for she suddenly thrust the magazine at Hannah, saying, “That's Mr. Arlen's house in Pomfret. Isn't it lovely?”

Having no idea who Mr. Arlen was, Hannah took the magazine and had barely glanced at it when Bal, obviously deciding that being nice to Gwenda might be no bad thing, reached for it and cast the kind of appreciative gaze at the pictures she must have hoped for.

“A beautiful house,” he said. “Where exactly is it?”

“Just outside Pomfret. I've been there.” Gwenda sounded immensely proud. “It was such a surprise opening that book and finding those lovely pictures of those rooms and that beautiful garden.”

As a scream rose in Hannah's throat that she fought successfully to control, the phone rang. Mrs. Brooks went out of the room to answer it. Bal raised his eyebrows and smiled at Hannah, who smiled back. She looked at her watch and saw that it was twenty past seven. Gwenda Brooks came back, said, “That was my husband. He's working late. He won't be back till eleven, if then.”

It was at this point that Hannah thought of asking her about the night drives and she would have done so but for a glance from Bal. It wasn't admonitory, as the “shagging” reproof had been, or even cautionary, but just a glance beyond interpretation. Still, it stopped her. “I must speak to your husband, Mrs. Brooks. He works in Kingsmarkham, doesn't he?”

“You can't go to the factory!”

“I may have to. What does the factory…er, manufacture?”

“They make electrical equipment. Pallant Smith Hussein, they're called. And it's not Kingsmarkham, it's Stowerton.”

The two towns were only about a mile apart and growing ever closer. “Will you tell him that I'll see him here at eight-thirty tomorrow morning or at Pallant Smith Hussein at ten? Get him to give me a call on this number.” Mrs. Brooks looked apprehensively at the mobile number on the card Hannah passed her. “Any time between now and eight tomorrow morning. He can leave me a message.”

Outside, one house along, Lydia Burton in a green and white sundress was watering her parched front garden from a can. She smiled and lifted her hand in a wave, the gesture of the innocent who have nothing to hide from the police. Now John Brooks was inaccessible until tomorrow, it occurred to Hannah that she and Bal had a free evening after all. There is nothing like a fine summer evening to put one in a mood for romantic sex. The air is warm and soft, punishing heat fading. The sky is still blue but the light is beginning to dim as the sun starts its progress to the dark horizon. (Well, it doesn't, thought Hannah, but that's how it
seems.
) Day is past and a lassitude settles on the limbs. It's the time for wine, for looking into another's eyes, for flowers closing their petals, for hands meeting across a table, for the decision, mutually taken, to leave and go where two can be alone.

Bal opened the car door for her. Was she going to have to ask him? And ask him exactly what? He started the car, looked at the clock on the dashboard and said, “Good, I won't have to miss my Hindi class after all.”

“Hindi?” she said faintly.

“It was my first language till I was about three. We were living here—I mean, in Lancashire—but my parents were studying English and they decided it would be best always to speak it at home for my sake and my sisters.' They didn't want us growing up with that sing-song accent.”

If she had said that it would have been the most politically incorrect thing!

“So the result was that I've forgotten most of my Hindi, but I really feel it would be sensible to get fluent in it again. With such a large Indian community in Britain, you see.”

“Oh, yes, I see. Of course I do.”

Nothing more was said. He took her to where she lived, the flat in a block called Drayton Court in Orchard Road.

“Well, good night,” she said.

“Sarge. I mean Hannah?”

“What?”

“I don't know if it's okay for a DC to ask a DS this, but will you have dinner with me? Friday or Saturday? Is it okay? I'm not sure about the what-d'you-call-it?—etiquette.”

“It's quite okay, Detective Constable,” said Hannah, laughing, “and yes, I'd love to.”

 

After the briefing, the press conference, and the news appeal, Wexford sat at the desk that had been provided for him and looked at the list DS Vine had given him of suspected users and dealers in Kingsmarkham and outlying districts. It was formidably long. Some of these people had been prosecuted, some charged, but no crime found and some simply looked on with suspicion. He couldn't help harking back to the past, when he was young, and in the whole of the British Isles there were something like six hundred registered drug users. Two years ago that had been the number of dealers calculated to live in these three towns and the surrounding villages, and even after the concerted purge he and his team had carried out reasonably successfully, he was sure more than a hundred remained and more were creeping back. Useless to think like that, useless to reflect that in his childhood a man or woman living in Pomfret or Myfleet thought heroin was a girl in a romantic novel and cocaine the anesthetic given to you by the dentist.

Barry Vine was at this moment searching the flat over the souvenir shop occupied by Keith Prinsip and Megan Bartlow with PC Overton to help him. DS Goldsmith and DC Bhattacharya were pursuing inquiries in Brimhurst. Burden had gone to talk to the Marshalsons in an effort to find out more about the curious friendship between Amber and Megan. Karen Malahyde had just returned from visiting the souvenir shop. She said to Wexford, “The chap who runs it is called Jimmy Gawson—hence the name Gew-Gaws. Ghastly, isn't it?”

“I know him,” said Wexford. “I've known him for years. Rehabilitated drunk.”

“Right. That figures. He says he came in as usual at ten on the second and Megan wasn't there, but there was this note on the door which just said ‘Back soon.' He says now he had a feeling all wasn't well, but I think that's hindsight.”

“He'd better not have too many feelings like that if this is murder.”

“No, sir. Gawson says after he'd been there a few minutes a woman came in and said she'd tried to get into the shop about nine-fifteen, but it was locked up and had that notice on the door. He hasn't seen Megan since.”

Wexford put Vine's list into his pocket and went out into the comparative cool of the evening. One car still remained on the forecourt, as much an interloper's as Daniel Hilland's had been. But Wexford said nothing to Darren Lovelace about towing or clamping. He said nothing at all. Well named, Lovelace had a pink baby face with soft red lips, blue eyes, fair but thinning curly hair, and the perpetually surprised expression of a fruit bat.

“Reggie, babes!”

It was worse than being called “guv,” far worse. But everyone got it: “Mikey, babes” and “Barry, babes” and, if he encountered the Deputy Chief Constable, probably “Sammy, babes.” Wexford said, “What?”

“Just a couple of questions.”

“I've given you everything you're getting. You were there just now and that's your lot.”

“Oh, dear,” said Lovelace, “I hope you won't regret it. No, don't look like that, not that naughty face. Did you think I was threatening you?”

“I came out for some fresh air and what I found was you.”

“Some people love me. Well, my mother does. You aren't exactly whizzing through this Marshalson business, are you? You haven't got anywhere at all as far as I can see.” Sorrowfully, Lovelace continued, “I don't want to do this, it hurts me more than it hurts you, as they used to say in my distant schooldays, all changed now thanks to the Charter of Human Rights, but I'm going to have to do a piece about your lack of progress. I really am, Reggie, babes.”

Usually skillful at repartee, Wexford always found himself bereft of wit and innocent of innuendo in the face of Lovelace's onslaughts. “I can't stop you.”

“You may not be right in other respects but you're right there, ducks.”

 

Sylvia couldn't remember when she had last been so angry. She had just got home from work, having picked up the boys from school, and had made herself a pot of tea. It is a peculiarity of the British, and probably the British alone, that to cool down on a very hot day they drink very hot tea. Sylvia really believed it was more efficacious than iced water or orange juice and she was drinking her first cup when the doorbell rang. She dragged herself to the front door, noticing that her ankles were swollen, which hadn't happened in her first two pregnancies. It was hotter and she was older, she thought despondently, and opened the door to Naomi and a woman she vaguely remembered seeing somewhere before.

That had been at five-thirty. It was nine now and her fury was fading. Robin and Ben had finally gone to bed after the usual complaints that it was too hot to sleep, they could hear a dog barking, a bee was buzzing against the window, and it was mean not letting them play video games in their bedrooms. The night was a purple sort of color and she could see what whoever it was meant when he called this “the violet hour.” A bird was singing somewhere among the weary leaves. A nightingale, she'd have thought, only nightingales don't sing in September. What the hell was Naomi playing at?

She had said, “May we come in, dear?” in that sweet little winsome voice. Sylvia sometimes wondered how Neil could stand it. “This is Mary, Mary Beaumont. She's come to live next door. Now you didn't know that, did you?”

Sylvia had no option but to say hello to this Mary, a rotund black woman with a friendly smile, and invite them both in. As for “next door,” the Old Rectory had no immediate neighbors. “You mean the cottages at the end of the lane,” she said in a cold tone, recalling where she had seen Mary, and at once despised herself for being an unjustified snob.

They went into the rectory's cavernous and little-used drawing room, which was bitterly cold in winter and cool in summer, even on the hottest day.

Mary sat down with a sigh of pleasure. “It's lovely in here. Like air-conditioning.”

So long as you don't think you can settle there for the rest of the evening, thought Sylvia nastily. Naomi, who had legs like sticks and ankles the span of a child's wrists, was staring at her feet.