The Red Herring (20 page)

‘An' you're sayin' that this headmaster you've got now doesn't do that?' Woodend asked, his curiosity aroused.

‘What?' Hargreaves asked, as if he had only just remembered that there was someone else in the room.

‘You were sayin' that this headmaster seems not to be puttin' the interests of the school first,' Woodend prompted.

‘If that's the impression you gained from what I've said, then I'm afraid you've misunderstood me,' Hargreaves said hastily. ‘The headmaster is doing an excellent job – a
really
excellent job.'

‘What did he do in the war?'

‘Why do you ask that?'

‘Why does anybody ask anythin'? I asked because I'm interested in the answer.'

‘The headmaster was with General Wingate in Burma – organising the Chindits in their guerrilla war against the Japanese in the jungle. He was decorated for bravery in the field. Several times, in fact. Perhaps that was the deciding factor when the governors were making their decision on who to appoint.'

‘You were a candidate for the job yourself?' Woodend guessed.

‘I applied,' Hargreaves admitted.

‘An' what did
you
do durin' the war? Did you see action?'

Hargreaves shook his head regretfully. ‘I had flat feet. They wouldn't take me. I spent my war in England – working for the Pay Corps.
I
was never given the chance to be a hero.' He paused, as if he had suddenly realised that Woodend was leading him somewhere he would rather not go. ‘What has any of this got to do with Helen Dunn's disappearance?' he asked.

‘Not a lot,' Woodend admitted. ‘So let's get
back
to Helen, shall we? What's she like as a pupil?'

‘Academically, very successful. Athletically, more than adequate,' Hargeaves said evasively.

‘But she doesn't seem to have many friends in the school?'

‘None at all. She was by nature a rather solitary individual. Some children are.'

‘You do know you're talkin' about her in the past tense, don't you?' Woodend asked. ‘Does that mean you think she's already dead?'

Hargreaves ran his hand agitatedly through his silver-grey hair. ‘No . . . I . . . No, of course not. It was a slip of the tongue, that's all.'

‘If we
are
to have any chance of findin' her alive, we need everybody who knew her to be open an' frank with us,' Woodend told him.

‘Naturally,' Hargreaves agreed.

‘Which means you need to tell me a hell of a lot more about her than I could have read off her report card. Is she a disruptive kid?'

‘Not in school, no.'

‘But
outside
it?'

One of the paper clips Hargreaves had been fiddling compulsively with snapped in two. The deputy headmaster looked down at it, as if surprised that his hands were capable of even such minor destruction. ‘This is all very difficult,' he said.

‘A girl's life is at stake!' Woodend reminded him.

The deputy head sighed. ‘One of the staff took Helen's class into Whitebridge to see an exhibition in the Town Hall,' he said reluctantly. ‘When it was over, the teacher gave the class permission to go to a nearby tea shop. Helen slipped away from the group. She went into Wilkinson's Department Store. Just as she was leaving, the store detective challenged her, and asked her to open her briefcase. Inside were several things that – not to put too fine a point on it – she'd been attempting to steal.'

‘What kinds of things?'

‘I forget the details now, but they were all trivial items which she could have bought out of her pocket money if she'd wanted to.'

‘Did the store call in the police?'

Hargreaves shook his head. ‘Helen was in uniform.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

The deputy head looked at him, almost pityingly. ‘The
King Edward's
school uniform,' he amplified.

‘I still don't get it.'

‘Both David Wilkinson, who manages the shop, and his father, who is chairman, are old boys of the school. They would never have done anything to damage King Edward's reputation.'

‘So nobody called the police. What did Helen's father have to say about the incident?'

‘He . . . er . . . wasn't told.'

‘Why the hell not? Didn't he have a
right
to know? Wouldn't you
normally
have informed the parents?'

‘Normally, yes,' Hargreaves agreed.

‘So what was different about this particular case?'

‘The teacher who was tutoring Helen privately after school interceded on her behalf and promised there would be no repetition of the incident.'

‘I'll need to speak to this teacher. What's his name?'

‘As a matter of fact, it was Miss Beale.'

‘I see,' Woodend said heavily. ‘So Miss Beale – a new teacher to the school, a teacher who can't have had more than a few years' experience – asks you to go against normal practice, and you agree? Just like that!'

‘Not just like that,' Hargreaves said. ‘I would have told her it wasn't possible, but unfortunately . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘Unfortunately, she had the headmaster's backing.'

‘Did she? An' why was that?'

‘Perhaps he was seeking to protect the school.'

‘An' did nobody give any thought to protectin' the kid?'

‘I'm afraid I'm not following you,' Hargeaves said unconvincingly.

‘Well, you bloody well should be,' Woodend told him. ‘The girl goes into a department store. In the middle of the school day! Dressed in a clearly identifiable uniform! An' what does she do once she's inside? She steals some things that she doesn't even really want. Didn't you even bother to ask yourself why?'

‘I
know
why!' Hargreaves said. His voice sounded angry – but Woodend did not think the anger was directed against the man who had forced him to make the admission. ‘She stole with the sole intention of getting caught. She wanted to do something to make her father notice her – to see her as an individual, rather than just a project he was developing.'

‘Aye, that's what I think, an' all,' Woodend said. ‘It was a call for help. So why did you ignore it?'

‘Because I had no choice in the matter. Because I was merely obeying instructions.'

‘That's what all those Nazi bastards used as their defence at the Nuremberg Trials,' Woodend said. ‘But that made no difference to the judges – they still strung the buggers up.'

R
utter glanced quickly up and down the neat suburban street, saw there was no sign of an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire anywhere, and signalled to the two teams of DCs in their strategically parked cars that they were to make no move unless he called for assistance. That done, he walked up the path of 33 Lime Grove.

The woman who answered the door was in her middle thirties, he guessed, though there was still something of a childlike quality to her open, trusting face. She was wearing a floral apron and rubber kitchen gloves, and seemed quite surprised that anyone should be calling at that time of day.

‘Mrs Cray?' Rutter asked.

‘Yes?'

‘I'm Inspector Rutter, from the Whitebridge Police. I was wondering if I could speak to your husband.'

‘He's not in,' the woman said, starting to look a little concerned. ‘What's this all about?'

‘Nothing you should get worried over,' Rutter said, not yet
quite
sure he was lying. ‘We're just conducting a few routine inquiries, and we thought your husband might be able to help us with one of them. Where is he, by the way? At work?'

‘That's right.'

‘And his place of work is the BAI factory?'

‘Yes. He's a quality control engineer. This hasn't got anything to do with the murder – or the missing girl – has it?'

‘What makes you ask that?' Rutter said. ‘You don't happen to know Verity Beale or Helen Dunn, do you?'

‘Not as far as I'm aware,' Mrs Cray said. ‘But since they're the ones who've been in all the papers . . .'

‘Those cases are both being handled by more experienced officers than me,' Rutter said, flashing one of his famous boyish grins. ‘I'm dealing with a much less important matter. You don't happen to remember whether or not your husband was at home the night before last, do you?'

‘The night of the murder, you mean?'

‘Yes, it was the night of the murder, now I come to think of it.
Was
he at home? Or, to put it another way, were you together? Did you go out for a meal or something?'

‘We rarely go out as a couple. The children aren't really old enough to be left in the house alone, and reliable babysitters are very hard to find.'

‘So you both stayed in, did you?'

‘No,
I
stayed in. Roger had to attend a meeting.'

‘What kind of meeting?'

Mrs Cray shrugged. ‘I don't know. I assumed it had something to do with his work.'

‘You sound like you don't get much time alone together,' Rutter said, sympathetically.

‘Oh, it's not that bad,' Mrs Cray said. ‘With the kids at school all day, we can sometimes manage to meet for lunch in Whitebridge.'

‘Did you have lunch together yesterday?'

‘No, Roger couldn't. He had another meeting and . . . and why are you asking me all these questions about my husband's whereabouts?'

Rutter turned and waved to one of parked cars, then swung round to face Mrs Cray again. ‘I've just called a policewoman over,' he explained. ‘I'd like her to stay with you for a while.'

‘What for?'

‘She won't be any trouble. You can carry on with your housework. She'll even help you with it if you want her to.'

‘I'm not an idiot,' Mrs Cray said angrily. ‘Why will she be here?'

‘She'll be here to make sure that you can't call your husband,' Rutter admitted.

‘So he is in trouble?'

‘I don't know. And I certainly don't want to alarm you unnecessarily.' Rutter hesitated for a second, then added, ‘But in all fairness, I think you should be prepared for a shock.'

Roger Cray walked through the main hangar-workshop where the fuselage of the TSR2 – the golden future of Britain's air defences, so some thought – was being constructed.

Everything was going wrong, he told himself worriedly. Everything was going terribly, tragically wrong.

Martin Dove had made it all so simple when he'd explained it during their clandestine meetings.

‘I'm a teacher at the
grammar
school, for God's sake!' Dove had said. ‘A pillar of the local establishment! Somebody you can trust your children with. Nobody's going to suspect me, not even for a moment.'

‘And what about me?' Cray had asked worriedly.

‘Why should they suspect you?'

‘Because of who I am!'

‘Let's think about who you are, if that's what's concerning you,' Dove had said, irritatingly calmly and logically. ‘You're a highly qualified man, holding down a highly respectable job. You've no criminal record – you don't even have any outstanding parking tickets. You're paying off a mortgage you can easily afford, and you have a wife and two children. Now isn't that all true?'

‘Yes, it's all true.'

‘You're Mr Middle Britain – so conventional you're almost boring. It's never going to cross anybody's mind that you'd risk all that to do something which could mean you'd end up behind bars for the rest of your life. That's what makes it so safe, you see – we're both totally above suspicion.'

Oh, he had a way with words, did Martin Dove, Cray thought bitterly. He could talk anybody into anything. But his words didn't seem to mean so much when they came up against stark reality.

‘You all right, Mr Cray?' one of the welders called to him from the scaffolding.

‘I'm fine,' Cray shouted back.

But he was thinking, Is it
so
obvious I'm in a state that even a man standing so far away from me can see it?

They should have called it off the moment Verity Beale had seen them together in the Spinner, he thought.

Verity Beale!

What a cunning, scheming bitch she had been! The first time they'd met, he'd thought the encounter had been accidental. But it hadn't been at all! Nothing Verity Beale did – or, rather,
had
ever done – had been accidental. She had played him like a violin. He could see that now. She had pretended to be interested in him, whereas all she'd really had an interest in was what he stood
for
.

Yes, once they'd seen Verity in the pub, they should have realised the game was up, and cut their losses. And if it had been left up to him, that was just what he
would
have done. But bloody Martin Dove had persuaded him – once again – that if they took the necessary precautions they could still get away with it.

He wondered if anybody had seen them together in the park the previous lunchtime – wondered if, even now, some policeman was matching up a series of reports which would eventually lead to his arrest.

He couldn't bear the thought of a trial. He would never be able to stand the shame. If it looked as if an arrest was imminent, he promised himself, he would take his own life without a second's hesitation.

As a distraction from his problems, he looked up at the shiny metal body which was gradually taking shape under the hangar roof.

The TSR-bloody-2! He had to laugh when he heard the politicians talking so confidently about it on the television.

He remembered the joke he had once heard.

Question: What's the definition of a camel?

Answer: A camel is a horse designed by a committee!