The Devil's Chair (20 page)

‘So. How can I help you?'

‘Tell me about Tracy. Was she popular?'

Agostino winked. ‘With the men,' he said. ‘Not always with the women.'

‘You mean she was a flirt?'

‘She would …' Agostino frowned in concentration, trying to locate the right words in his vocabulary. ‘Step over the mark,' he said finally. ‘But sometimes she would
hit it off
with some female visitor.' He spoke the phrase in a tentative voice, as though testing the water.

‘Anyone in particular?'

‘Back in November,' he said slowly, ‘we had a convention for social workers. One of them seemed to strike up quite a friendship with Tracy,' he said, ‘though I wouldn't have thought she was her kind.'

It seemed unimportant but Roberts asked anyway. ‘Her name?'

‘Sheila Weston. She was from Slough. She kept an eye on Daisy a time or two.'

‘And with the rest of the staff?'

‘She did her work.'

Which led Roberts to speculate that Tracy Walsh was not that popular amongst her colleagues.

Roberts tried to think of something more he should be asking or even what he should have gleaned from the interview but his mind had seized up. He simply shook Agostino's hand. ‘Well, thanks very much,' he said. ‘You've been very helpful.'

Agostino looked a bit puzzled at that but shrugged and smiled. ‘It is my duty,' he said.

As he was leaving, Roberts looked around him. ‘This is a lovely place,' he said. ‘Do you mind me asking how much it costs to stay here a night?'

‘It depends on which room you have,' the manager said. ‘But around one hundred and twenty pounds is average.'

Roberts nodded. He would love to bring Flora here.

‘What sort of people stay here?'

‘Well, it is a good base to explore Shropshire from,' Agostino said. ‘The hills are great for walkers and explorers. The town is beautiful too. A great antiques centre and lovely individual shops and restaurants. Shrewsbury and Ludlow are not far. There is Acton Scott Farm.' He grinned. ‘Plenty to do if you wish to be active. But many people just want to chill.'

Roberts decided Agostino was definitely wearing his hotelier's hat. He was sounding like someone from the Shropshire Tourist Board.

Agostino continued. ‘And, of course, we do conferences here too. A month ago we had social workers again. Thirty social workers.' Agostino smiled, showing one stained incisor. ‘Imagine thirty social workers.'

Roberts decided he'd rather not.

As he was leaving Agostino put his hand on his arm. ‘I hope you find the little girl,' he said. ‘She was such a sweet little thing. A real hit with some of the guests.'

Roberts left then, turning back as he drove back down towards the town of Church Stretton.

Just as Randall and DS Talith were heading for the airport, events took an unexpected turn.

I
t began with that most innocuous event of all, yet another phone call from a member of the public. The investigating team was getting more than a hundred a day, usually from people who
thought
they'd seen Daisy. It was impossible to look into them all. The team did what they could, looked into the most likely sightings and relied on local police forces to help them out. Already the numbers of officers assigned to the case was over a hundred. There were literally yards of computer printouts, megabytes of information stored and hundreds of statements and forensic results. As was usual in cases like this, the information gathering had been wide and extensive, proliferating as though it had a life of its own, which in a way it did. Information appeared to generate information. The phrase
no stone unturned
was perfectly appropriate.

But this phone call was different from the others. For a start it originated from an alert octogenarian who kept fit by trotting up and down Carding Mill Valley. Daily, come rain or shine, snow, frost or heat wave. He timed himself rigorously and stuck to
exactly
the same route every day so the search for Daisy Walsh had been an inconvenience, messing up his lifestyle of extreme regularity. But that was the point. ‘Exactly the same route,' he barked down the phone. ‘No deviation whatsoever. I could do it blindfolded.'

Only he hadn't. He'd kept his eyes wide open.

Added to that this interesting and unique situation the octogenarian's eyesight was as sharp as an eagle's and he also had the observation powers of a secret agent. These were the points to consider and to remember. And Desk Sergeant Sandy Mucklow did. The life of a desk sergeant could be sadly mundane – plenty of drunks, arguing motorists, stroppy druggies and so on, but as he listened to the content of the call his toes began their familiar twitching. There was something about Freddy Ribbler's voice, born to command, which made perfect sense as he had served his country proudly in the Second World War alongside General Montgomery. Incidentally it was ‘Monty' who had handed him his first cigarette, a habit he had struggled to conquer for the next fifteen years.

‘It wasn't there yesterday,' Ribble insisted. No one would have argued with him.

Mucklow frowned. ‘What wasn't there?'

‘Well, it's a bit sodden but it looks like a child's dressing gown, if you ask me.' There was a moment of bluster before Ribbler continued. ‘Not that I'm in any way an expert. My wife and I were not blessed with little sprogs but I rather think it might be the one that the little girl— The child who's missing. It could be the very one she was wearing. It's pink with a little motif on the front. And I'm afraid …'

Mucklow listened with dread.

‘I'm afraid there's a stain on it. It looks very much like blood.'

Desk Sergeant Mucklow was instantly alert. ‘We'll send somebody out. I don't suppose you'd mind waiting with the garment?'

‘We-ell. It's freezing cold, you know, now I've stopped running.'

‘We'll be no longer than half an hour, sir. We'd be very grateful.'

‘All right, if it helps to find the poor child. Wherever she is,' he added gruffly.

‘And please try not to touch it.'

The request provoked a harrumph in response.

So at the very time that Talith and Alex Randall were airborne, mobiles off, heading up to Scotland, PC Sean Dart was heading south down the A49 back towards Church Stretton. Knowing it wasn't really justified, he didn't dare put the blue light on but broke the speed limit anyway, straightening out the corners in his anxiety to arrive.

What the hell was going on? Was this it? Was it a deliberate plant by someone with a warped interest in the case? Would the next thing they discovered be her body? Was this trail of clues leading them to that, or something else?

A car had been provided to take Randall and Talith to a small cottage, just outside a village ten miles from Inverness, where Allistair Donaldson lived – with his mother, they'd imagined.

When they reached the cottage they saw two cars outside, a four-wheel drive Toyota and a small Hyundai. But when they knocked on the door it was pulled open by a very pretty, young girl with waist-length poker straight blonde hair, patently not Mrs Donaldson. Talith simply stared. The girl was a vision, bright red lipstick, sprayed-on tight black leggings on long, long legs and a loose white shirt unbuttoned at the top to show … Talith cleared his throat noisily and the girl stepped forward, a warm smile sweetening her face even more. ‘You must be the police,' she said, not a trace of anxiety. ‘Sorry you've had to come all this way for nothing. Come in,' she continued and they followed the swinging blonde hair into the inside.

The up-to-date look of the girl was at odds with the interior of the cottage, which was quite rough and old fashioned. She led them into a sitting room where a tall young man was just easing himself out of a deep chintzy sofa. ‘Hello there,' he said, with only the faintest of Scottish brogues. ‘I'm Allistair. And I think you've already met Arlene.'

The blonde girl gave the two police a wide smile. ‘We've met,' she said with the confidence of the beautiful.

Lara Tinsley had finally got through to passport control and had some answers. Charity Ignatio had left the UK on 3 April and returned on 24 April. She was out of the picture. With iris recognition, she was assured, by a rather snotty immigration official, no, Ms Ignatio could
not
possibly have slipped back into the country. She scored her own back by responding in an equally aloof tone that she was one of the officers assigned to investigate a fatal car accident and the abduction of a four-year-old girl. That shut his pompous mouth. She banged the phone down.

WPC Delia Shaw had hit lucky. When she pulled up outside Lucy Stanstead's house she could see only one car in the drive and a pale face staring out of the window. Lucy Stanstead opened the door before she'd even had time to knock. ‘He's had to report back to his boat,' she said breathlessly. ‘Sorry – his ship,' she corrected with a grin.

WPC Shaw could imagine she used the word
boat
simply to annoy her husband, and she responded with a grin of her own.

‘Only for some checks,' Lucy added, ‘but he'll be away all day.'

Delia Shaw had been a good choice to tease out any facts from Lucy Stanstead. She put the general public at their ease. They liked her friendly, rather mumsy manner, her scrubbed, wholesome face, and were reassured by her wide smile. WPC Shaw would be regarded by some as plain and by others as beautiful. She had that sort of face. You saw what you wanted to see. But no one, male or female, ever felt threatened by the PC.

The first thing that struck her about Mrs Stanstead was that she appeared to live in a permanently nervous state, her eyes frequently focusing back towards the window and the front drive, flinching every time a car went past.

The woman lives on her nerves
, she thought.

She let her make her a cup of tea and settled down on the cream-coloured sofa which was soft with duck down and soporifically comfortable.

‘Mrs Stanstead,' she began, leaning forward, an open, earnest, inviting expression on her face, ‘nothing you say will go any further unless it has a bearing on the investigation, you understand.'

The woman's returning smile was both cynical and sad. She wafted her hands up. ‘It doesn't matter now,' she said. ‘Not now that Tracy's dead and Daisy …' A spasm crossed her face. She twisted her eyes up but the action failed to prevent a tear squeezing out of her eye.

‘It's all …'

‘What is?'

‘Nothing is as it was.'

‘Sorry?'

‘I can't have children of my own,' she said bluntly.

Delia Shaw felt a frisson of embarrassment. Sometimes it was hard to separate one's personal life from work. ‘There's things they can do,' she said awkwardly. ‘Treatments.'

And have you tried them?

‘Not in my case,' Lucy Stanstead said sadly. ‘I can't have children,' she said, even more firmly.

‘So Daisy …?' Shaw felt she was punching holes in the dark. But beyond that was a bright light so dazzling she felt her eyes start to screw up in an involuntary squint.

‘Tracy didn't
want
her,' Lucy Stanstead said, her voice hard with accusation. ‘Daisy was just a
nuisance
to her. Neil told me that Tracy's attitude to the child was that Daisy stopped her “
having a life
”.' She scribbled the quote with her fingers. The way she spoke the words Delia Shaw could almost see them spewing out of Tracy Walsh's mouth as a sneer, bitter and angry of the life she
could
have had without a child to hamper her style.

‘Whereas Neil …' She licked her lips, her voice smug now. ‘Neil and I – we simply adored her. She was a lovely little girl.'

Shaw picked up quickly on the tense. ‘Was?'

‘She can't still be alive, can she? It's been more than two weeks. And no sign of her.'

‘So where do you think she is?'

Again Lucy looked evasive, cunning.

‘Mrs Stanstead,' Coleman said, ‘if you know where Daisy is you must tell me.'

The blue eyes looked panicked.

‘Mrs Stanstead?'

‘I have nothing more to say,' she said. ‘Except I don't know what's happened to Daisy. I wish I did.'

WPC Shaw wasn't sure whether this was the truth. But she reverted to the conventional questions. ‘The Saturday night of the accident – where were you?'

‘Here.'

‘Alone?'

‘Yes – alone.'

‘Mrs Stanstead, what plans did you have for Neil and Daisy?'

The woman stonewalled her. ‘I'm sorry,' she said politely, ‘I don't know what you mean.'

Oh yes you do
, Shaw thought. ‘Let me put it this way, Mrs Stanstead: were you planning to leave your husband for Neil Mansfield?'

The woman's shoulders drooped. ‘It doesn't matter now.'

It was not an answer.

‘But Daisy was not his daughter. She wasn't even legally adopted. He would have had no rights.'

And suddenly the claws were out. ‘He wouldn't have needed it.' The words burst out of her like an erupting boil. ‘If Tracy hadn't made such a fuss we could have brought her up.'

‘But …?' Shaw asked the question gently.

But … Lucy Stanstead had clammed up.

Shaw tried another tack. ‘Are you able to shed any light on the accident and the possible whereabouts of Daisy?'

Lucy Stanstead simply shook her head.

Shaw gave her one more chance. ‘Is there anything
more
you want to tell me at this point?'