Shooting Elvis (22 page)

‘Who told you about that?’

‘I have my spies. You don’t have to work with him, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the job, but I know what you mean. I wish he’d stop calling me guv.’

‘It’s a military thing,’ Dave told me.

I said, ‘You mean, like, he says it to keep a distance between us?’

‘That’s right. In the army, on exercises, you might drop most of the bullshit, use first names, that sort of thing. But if you didn’t like an officer you’d keep it formal.’

‘Well that’s reassuring. Thanks for that, Dave.’

‘Don’t mention it. What time tonight?’

‘I’ll give you a ring.’

I spent the rest of the afternoon reading reports and processing all the other stuff that piled up on my desk. Jeff came in with a smile on his face
and his ears more prominent than usual.

‘I’ve been to see Angie,’ he told me.

‘Angie of the sex shop fame?’

‘That’s right.’ He stroked each side of his head twice with his fingertips. ‘Gave me a trim, on the house. I’ve told her that we’ve given young Terry Hyson a good talking to but he denies it was him. She says he’s a lying toad. Anyway, she’s changing the name of the shop to Kurl up and Dye.’

‘In memory of Hyson?’

‘Probably. I told her that it isn’t very original, so she said we’ve to think of something better.’

‘You mean like Herr Kutz, the Hair Port, and all those?’

‘Mmm, but original.’

‘Right, if I can’t sleep tonight I’ll give it some thought. How’s everything else?’

‘No problems, except we haven’t traced that Merc yet.’

‘Keep at it.’

I decided on lasagne and bread and butter pudding and sneaked out to buy them before they sold out for the day, but I was too late: they’d had a run on the bread and butter pudding. M & S bread and butter pudding is my favourite, next to homemade apple pie, but they were right out of it. Ah, well, it would just have to be rhubarb crumble. I put the bag in the car boot and went back to the office. I could have finished reasonably early and made it home in time for a run, but I didn’t feel like
it, and being late in from work was the easiest way of dodging it. I went upstairs and talked with Gilbert, reminded him of the way we were tackling the case. Going over things sometimes helps, but not this time. When the rush hour traffic had subsided I placed everything in neat piles on my desk and drove home.

I decided I’d do the crumble and the lasagne in the oven rather than the microwave. Microwaves are quick but they are savage. Rhubarb crumble requires gentle treatment, and there was plenty of time. Sonia’s run would take her about an hour and a half, including driving to and from the golf club.

Men were walking about in their shirtsleeves and shorts, the women in minuscule tops with thin straps. I wound the car window down and started to sing a happy song, out loud, but not loud enough for anybody else to hear:

‘Sometahms Ah feel like a mudderless chile,

Sometahms Ah feel like a mudderless chile…
’

That one always cheers me up. A girl in a cotton dress was approaching a zebra crossing in front of me, so I slowed and gestured her across. She gave me a smile and I flashed my lopsided one at her. It would be a good evening for a steady run. I could have done it bare-chested, worked at my tan. I’d need a tan if I went to South Africa with Sonia. I’d prefer to go to Arizona, I thought, but
Sith Ifrica
would do.

Curlew!
It just came to me, out of the blue,
like being hit by an aeroplane door.
Curlew Hairdressing,
with a curlew logo. I’d tell Jeff in the morning. I’d never seen a Curlew Hairdressing salon anywhere. Why doesn’t inspiration like that come to me about important things, though, I wondered?

‘Sometahms Ah feel like a mudderless chile…’

I was pulling into my driveway as I reached the end of the stanza…

‘A long wa-ay from home.’

Sonia’s car wasn’t on the drive, but she’d left a note under the kettle, where I couldn’t miss it. ‘Back about half seven. Have the tea ready,’ it said. The clock on the oven was showing 19:09 and the lasagne needed 30 minutes at 190 degrees. The oven would take at least five minutes to reach that temperature, so Sonia would have enough time for a quick shower before we ate. Perfect. I switched the oven on and washed my hands. Our breakfast things were on the draining rack, so I put them away and removed the lasagne and the pudding from their cartons. There was some broccoli in the fridge’s salad tray, so I decided we’d have that too. It was hardly five portions, but I sometimes wonder if the people who come up with these recommendations live in the real world.

When the little red light went out I put the lasagne on the top shelf of the oven and set the timer for 14 minutes. The pudding only needed 16 minutes, so it could go in then. When the broccoli
came to the boil I turned the heat off and placed the lid on the pan. That would cook itself in thirty minutes. I could have been a chef, if I hadn’t made the grade as a cop.

I placed knives, forks and spoons on the table, with an empty glass for each of us. When the pips went I placed the pudding on the middle shelf and reset the timer for another 16 minutes. The clock was showing 19:28, so
La Gazelle
should have finished her run and be setting off home. I had a drink of water from the tap and settled down to snooze in the rocking chair.

The timer announced that the lasagne was cooked at 19:44, but Sonia still hadn’t arrived. I went in the front room and flicked round the channels, with the usual disappointing result. Back in the kitchen I put Sonia’s Robbie Williams in the player and settled down to wait. He’s no Frank Sinatra. After a couple of songs I went outside and sat on the bench with the sun on my face until the character next door started his petrol mower and began to chug up and down his garden. Some people are never content to let nature take care of things. They trim and prune, dead-head and weed, and their gardens don’t look any better than mine. Not if you’re a bird or a hedgehog. Maybe we’d have to have a blitz on it, next weekend, before the neighbours organised a petition.

Marks and Spencer’s lasagne contains beef, egg pasta, tomatoes, milk, water, onions, mushrooms,
cream, wheatflour, cheese, butter, olive oil, cornflour, oregano, pepper, bay and nutmeg. All good stuff. A portion of their rhubarb crumble provides fifteen per cent of the daily energy requirement of an average man. I worked it out from the figures on the box. I opened the oven door to stop our dinner drying out and put the kettle on. She must have met someone she knew, and perhaps they’d called for a drink in the clubhouse. When she hadn’t arrived home or rung me by 8.30 I began to worry. What if she’d fallen in the woods and sprained an ankle or damaged her knee again? I gave her another ten minutes, then drove to the golf club.

The dog-walkers had long gone and her car was standing all alone where we always park. The doors were locked and the engine cold. I walked round it, as if expecting it to speak to me, but it didn’t. All four tyres were inflated. It just stood there, enigmatic, like the
Mary Celeste.
The steward of the golf club wasn’t much help. No, nobody in running kit had been in for a drink that evening. From the clubhouse you can see right round the golf course, and she wasn’t there. I decided that she must be in the woods.

It took me nearly 40 minutes to walk our route through the woods, and it was almost dark when I arrived back at the cars, without Sonia. I rang Dave.

‘Dave, it’s Charlie,’ I said. ‘I’m worried stiff. Sonia’s missing.’

‘Missing? What do you mean by missing?’

Poor Dave. He thought I was trying to tell him that Sonia had walked out on me. ‘She went out for a run,’ I explained, ‘and she’s lost somewhere. She should have been back two hours ago. I’m at the golf club and I’ve walked her route, but she’s not there.’

‘Where are you now?’ he asked.

‘I’m in the golf club car park, standing next to her car.’

Dave was silent for a few moments, then he said, ‘OK, Charlie, how’s this sound: her car wouldn’t start, or she lost the key, and she’s jogged home?’

It sounded so obvious. ‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘It’s a possibility.’

‘Right. So you go home and see if she’s there. Ring me on my mobile, either way.’

‘I’m on my way,’ I told him, convinced he was right. The simple explanation is always the right one.

But she wasn’t there. I shouted her name, dashing from room to room, upstairs and down, turning lights on. There was no sign of her, no sound from the bathroom of a running shower, no pile of running kit on the bed, no other note. I reread the one she’d left, double checked the time, and found myself soaked in a cold sweat.

‘She’s not here, Dave,’ I told him.

‘OK. It’s all in hand. I’ve sent for Jeff and alerted uniformed. Task force are standing by so I’ll tell
them to get here – I’m at the golf course. She’s probably fallen and hurt herself, or perhaps her knee has let her down. You stay there and wait in case she comes home.’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I’m coming back.’ Dave’s a good pal, wouldn’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, but you don’t send for the task force for someone who’s sprained an ankle. He was daring to think what I was too terrified to consider.

Mondays are our quietest night, so three pandas were there when I arrived back, as were Jeff Caton and several others of the team. Gareth Adey, my uniformed counterpart, arrived, wearing jeans and cowboy shirt, fresh from his line dancing class. Jeff had brought the Ordnance Survey map and I tried to indicate on it the path she would have taken. Heckley Wood isn’t Sherwood Forest. It’s about one mile by half a mile, but is ancient woodland with lots of fine big trees, mainly oak, birch and ash, that must be centuries old. The ground is pockmarked with craters, the remnants of bell-pits where ancient monks mined for coal. Brambles and bracken choke the spaces between the trees, with a network of paths criss-crossing the area. In spring the wood is ablaze with bluebells, but tonight they were well past their best.

Under Gareth’s direction the uniformed boys armed themselves with torches and set off to follow her route. It was fully dark as the task force van arrived and the searchers straggled back into the
car park. There were eight of them in the van, under the supervision of a sergeant. His first suggestion was to send for a dog handler. Why hadn’t I thought of that? He was with us in ten minutes, saying he needed something worn by Sonia to give the dog a scent to find. Her tracksuit was inside the car. I unlocked it with the spare key I had brought with me and handed the suit to the dog handler.

‘Find him! Find him!’ the handler urged, burying the dog’s muzzle into the tracksuit top, and the dog started running round in circles, nose to the ground, tail wagging. It zigged and zagged a couple of times before plunging off into the darkness.

‘OK,’ the task force sergeant said, summoning his troops, after I’d told him Sonia’s probable route. ‘Let’s get on with it. We’ll do a systematic search of that half of the wood first. Form your line that side.’ He turned to Gareth and asked if he could borrow his men, and Dave and Jeff said they’d join the line, too.

Gareth had sent for reinforcements and the park was surrounded, in case anybody tried to escape from it. It wasn’t explained to me, but I knew what everybody was thinking. The searchers spaced themselves at five-yard intervals and slowly moved into the wood. Their torches sent beams of light flashing on the tree trunks and illuminating
criss-crossing
branches that flickered bright for a moment, cutting the blackness into an ever-changing
cubist nightmare of shapes. The shadows danced and swayed and closed in again behind the searchers.

‘Sonia! It’s the police, where are you?’ It was Dave, shouting her name. Their torches had vanished apart from the occasional stray beam of light as someone examined the undergrowth. A minute later he called again, fainter. The third time he was barely audible.

‘Thanks for coming, Gareth,’ I said.

‘They’ll find her, Charlie.’

‘Of course they will.’

I’ve never believed in all this positive thinking stuff. Not when it’s about events you have no control over. It’s one thing for someone like Sonia to believe that she can train to make herself the best, but no amount of positive thinking or
self-hypnotism
or any other mumbo jumbo will help you overcome gravity or change the mind of a madman. There was no moon. We leaned on the bonnet of my car and didn’t speak again. Away to the left were the windows of the clubhouse, and beyond the golf course we could see the orange glow of the lights on the bypass. Otherwise, the darkness was near total.

The torches appeared again, a couple of hundred yards away, and we heard the Sergeant shouting instructions. Within seconds they had vanished back into the wood. Over at the clubhouse car engines were starting. Headlights swept round,
dazzling us briefly before driving away. It was going home time. Call it eleven-thirty. Sonia had been out for over five hours. Half of the clubhouse lights went out, then the other half.

I thought of her, and how I’d felt, two weeks ago as she pranced her way to victory. She was almost apologetic, while I nearly exploded with pride.
La Gazelle
was back! But I was just as happy about how she handled defeat, and as she’d pounded her lonely way on the last half of yesterday’s race the crowd recognised they were watching someone special, and gave her the biggest cheer. Was it only yesterday?

High above us the stars were a blazing trail across the sky and I was looking for constellations, wondering how many billions of light years they were away, when the warbling of a phone brought me back from where I was trying to escape to. I turned to Gareth but he already had it to his ear.

‘You have?’ he said, and, ‘Right. Where are you…? Yes, he’s with me… A couple of minutes. Right.’

He closed the phone and said, ‘They’ve found something, Charlie. They want you round there.’

‘What?’ I demanded, dreading the answer, not sure if I wanted to know. ‘What have they found?’