Harum Scarum (22 page)

Emma had also told her that her mother and Aidan Stoppard were lovers.

She regarded Stoppard closely; he wore white pants and a lightweight dark polo neck. When she’d seen him the other day from the car, she’d assumed his hair had been wet from the shower, now she realised it must have been slicked down with gel. In contrast to Miranda’s dying swan look, Stoppard looked clean, neat and pressed, as if he’d at least had the time to shower and change while Miranda was making her frantic calls to the police.

He fingered a longish curl behind his ear where a single diamond stud gleamed. ‘Err, don’t you want to hear the details?’ he asked.

Stevie glanced at Miranda. She wasn’t looking at either of them, but was busy rolling the hem of her robe back and forth between her fingers.

‘Go on,’ Stevie said.

‘I heard screaming from Emma’s room. I rushed in and turned the light on. She woke up, seemed very embarrassed, said she had a nightmare and apologised for disturbing me.’

‘She often gets night terrors,’ Miranda stammered. ‘When she was younger it was always the monster from under her bed. I would’ve gone if I’d heard her, but I’d taken a sleeping pill and was out for the count.’

A hollow feeling grew in the pit of Stevie’s stomach.

‘And what time was it that you went into Emma’s room, Mr Stoppard?’ Stevie asked, the hollow feeling turning to dread.

‘About one o’clock, I’d say.’

Stevie kept her voice level. ‘Did she say anything else?’

‘She said there was a man in her room. I searched it, looked in the wardrobe, under the bed, out the window—just to humour her, yeah? She seemed reassured by this and went back to sleep. I feel like a right prat now of course, I should have believed her.’

‘Stupid, Aidan, stupid,’ Miranda spat, the air around her crackling as if with static. She reached for a glass half filled with orange juice, and downed it in a couple of swallows. Aidan looked at her, his eyes narrow with anger. But when Miranda returned his glare, Stevie was sure she saw something else flash in them.

Stevie asked Miranda to take her up to Emma’s room. Stoppard followed them up the stone staircase.

The room wasn’t the orderly high tech sanctuary Stevie had imagined. The single bed was a mess of twisted sheets and the chair near it upturned with one of the curtains draped over it as if yanked from the track. Hot air and flies poured in through the open window.

‘Was the room like this when you first checked on Emma, Mr Stoppard?’ she asked as she looked around the room. A pile of magazines seemed to have been tipped from the desk and fanned across the floor. She glanced at the titles, mostly computer mags but also copies of
New Scientist and Psychology Today.
A softball bat lay at an angle next to them.

‘No, it was a lot tidier than this,’ Stoppard replied. ‘But the window was open and I closed it.’ He hesitated, the silence sounded contrived, as if he was willing himself to at least sound repentant. ‘It does look like she was telling the truth after all, doesn’t it? It wasn’t a dream, the man was real and he must have come back later and taken her.’

A World Vision poster on the pin board above Emma’s desk had a picture of a small African boy pinned onto it. There was also a snap of a khaki-clad man on the board, crouching down as if to examine a ragged line of African children. The picture seemed old and the colours faded.

‘Who’s that?’ Stevie said, pointing.

‘Her father, years ago, before we were married,’ Miranda replied with a dismissive wave of her hand.

A comfy armchair next to Emma’s desk was covered with a Mexican throw rug and a well-worn teddy bear was sitting on it. It hadn’t occurred to Stevie that Emma would be the kind to hang on to an old teddy—her grandmother’s encyclopaedia maybe, but not a teddy. A postcard was propped upon the Teddy’s arms, showing a rolling scenic view with a European castle in the foreground. She swallowed down the growing ache in her throat.
You’re all right Emma, you’re safe; I know you are and I’ll find you.

Stoppard followed her movements intently, joining her at the bedroom window when she moved over to examine it. ‘Did you lock this after closing it?’ she asked him.

‘No, I’m afraid not,’ Stoppard said. ‘It didn’t cross my mind; it’s on the second floor, isn’t it. It would be pretty hard for someone to get in.’

‘Stupid, Aidan, stupid,’ Miranda spat again.

Stoppard briefly closed his eyes and rubbed the back of his head as if it ached.

Stevie peered down through the open window. Emma’s room was at the front of the house, the view of the road blocked only by a line of skinny pine trees. She could see the flyscreen lying in the garden bed next to the wall on which a rose trellis was tacked. Part of the trellis looked as if it had been prised away from the wall, the young rose left to waver in the breeze.

‘Is this damage new, Mrs Breightling?’ Stevie pointed to the trellis.

Miranda moved next to her and peered down. ‘Yes, I think so. The gardener only put it up last year.’

‘Do you think that’s what the man climbed up to get through the window?’ Stoppard asked.

‘Possibly,’ she said curtly, mentally noting the vacuousness of the question. A car pulled up and she saw Monty step out of an unmarked police car and behind him a blue and white with a couple of uniformed officers.

‘My colleagues have arrived, they’ll need to talk to you,’ she addressed the hovering couple. ‘Scene of crime officers will be searching this room and the rest of the house.’ She cocked her head to Emma’s PC. ‘We’ll need to take this too. Has Doctor Breightling been notified of Emma’s disappearance, ma’am?’

‘Mr Breightling, not Doctor Breightling,’ Miranda corrected. ‘He’s a surgeon. Yes, he’s due home today, any minute in fact. Aidan rang him and he was already driving home from the airport.’ She looked down at her attire and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘I suppose I’d better go and get dressed.’

Stevie met Monty in the hall and filled him in on Emma’s disappearance. She also took the opportunity to mention some of her discoveries from the previous night.

‘So, who is this Harum Scarum character?’ Monty asked when she’d finished. ‘Adult, kid, male, female?’

‘I’ve no idea, I’m handing the problem over to Clarissa as soon as I get away from here.’

‘But you think this Katy Enigma site, this Harum Scarum, supports abused kids—it’s not just another way of gaining their trust and conning them?’ he queried, rubbing his chin.

‘I’m not sure of anything yet. It’s just that some of the stories and poems are very suggestive. And no, I don’t think it’s a scam. I think any actual counselling support that goes on probably happens in private emails, like those between Harum Scarum and Bianca. But the thing is, I think Emma’s involved with this website too. Not only did she tell Izzy Katy Enigma stories, but there’s an anonymous poem on the site that sounds like something she may have written. It implies abuse.’

Monty cocked an eyebrow; a website helping abused children becomes undermined by paedophiles—the irony wasn’t lost on Stevie either.

‘So this site might have been discovered by another paedophile who’s now taken Emma?’ Monty asked.

Stevie sighed. ‘I don’t know what to think. I can’t believe Emma would be conned as easily as Bianca.’

‘It’s a stretch, Stevie.’

‘It’s all we have.’

They heard the sound of an approaching car. Through the open front door they watched a silver Mercedes turn into the driveway and pass into the garage through an automatic roller door.

Monty tipped his head toward the closing garage door. ‘The father?’

‘I guess so, I’ve never met him.’

‘Is the mother still getting changed?’

‘She doesn’t change,’ Stevie said. ‘She sheds.’

A tallish man in a well-made suit, Christopher Breightling had quick blue eyes which spent more time flitting between his friend and his wife than on Monty who was speaking to him.

‘We’ll need to put a recording device on your home and mobile phones,’ Monty continued with his brief. ‘If she’s been kidnapped for money, you’ll probably be getting some kind of a ransom message soon.’

‘But what if she’s been taken by a pervert,’ Miranda said. ‘What if we hear nothing until she’s found like that last girl, dumped in a garbage bin?’

Christopher’s shoulders slumped as he sat at the breakfast bar. His hand slid across the granite surface to clasp his wife’s, which lay unresponsive under his. He slowly released it as if he was well aware of the futility of his gesture, his features taking on a stamp of defeated weariness.

There was constant coming and going as police officers photographed and dusted for prints, searched the house. The garden bed below Emma’s bedroom window had already been examined, the SOCO officer reporting the discovery of several similar bare footprints, approximately women’s size five.

‘Has Emma ever run away from home, Mrs Breightling?’ Stevie asked.

‘No, why should she?’ Miranda replied with a prickly look.

‘I don’t claim to know Emma particularly well, but I did get the impression from talking to her the other day that she wasn’t happy at the moment.’

‘Then I don’t think you know her at all,’ said Christopher Breightling. ‘She is a perfectly happy child.’

‘There was only one set of footprints under the window, Mr Breightling,’ Monty said. ‘And we think they might be Emma’s. We found no evidence of prints belonging to any one else. We think Emma might have climbed out of the window herself.’

‘The man might have gone down the stairs and grabbed her from the front of the house when she was trying to escape him,’ Stoppard persisted with his theory.

Stevie ignored him and spoke to Christopher. ‘When I was chatting with her the other day, she told me she didn’t want to go east to boarding school.’

Christopher lifted his head in surprise. ‘What? She told you that?’ He glanced at his wife.

Miranda shrugged.

A physical and emotional wreck when she’d first admitted Stevie to her home, Miranda was now a different woman. Made up, hair coiffed and wearing an elegant fuchsia sundress, she could have been on her way to a garden party rather than being questioned over her daughter’s possible abduction. Did she care at all? While there was no prescribed script for this kind of emotional trauma, Stevie couldn’t help comparing Miranda’s appearance to the empty shell that was Stella Webster.

Stevie excused herself from the group in the family room and made her way to the front of the house where she found the SOCO sergeant in the hall. She asked him to accompany her to the master bedroom, which had yet to be searched.

The gown Miranda had been wearing lay crumpled in the middle of the floor, one discarded slipper, then another, followed by some knotted panties, formed a trail to the ensuite bathroom. She skirted the puddles on the floor, took in the dripping mirror, flapped her hands at the steam still hanging in the air. Lipsticks and lotions, bottles and tubes of make-up lay strewn across the vanity top.

Stevie slipped on a pair of latex gloves and prised the lid off a bottle of natural health pills near the sink, tipping a few into her hand.

‘Do these look like echinacea tablets to you?’ she asked the sergeant. He bent to examine the small white pills in her palm. Without answering, he picked up a pestle and mortar from the bench top and ran his fingers along the marble surfaces, showing Stevie the fine white powder on his fingertips.

‘Silly bitch,’ he said.

Stevie agreed. ‘This explains her transformation.’ The sergeant recorded the details of the find and Stevie returned to the family room and pulled Monty aside.

When he’d heard what she had to say, he held up the bottle of pills and rattled them in front of others. ‘Compressed cocaine,’ he said, ‘found in your bathroom, Mrs Breightling.’

Miranda’s mouth formed an ‘O’, which she covered delicately with one finger in a 1950’s ingenue gesture. Was she sending herself up?

Christopher Breightling looked angrily at his wife. ‘Miranda...’ he began and stopped. He loosened the knot of his tie, ‘Inspector, surely this is not the time or the place...’

‘Have some compassion, man,’ Stoppard interjected, large chin thrust forward with belligerence. Stevie made as if to look away, but continued to observe him through her peripheral vision. She might have been mistaken, but she could’ve sworn she saw a twinkle of amusement in those deep-set eyes.

Breightling clenched his fists.

Monty said nothing, merely slipped the pills into his pocket and began to pace the room. He stopped at the abstract
objet d’art
and touched one of the sharp points, his face briefly showing the same surprised look Stevie had seen—was it only yesterday?—on Izzy’s.

‘It’s an original Sienna-Pastor sculpture.’ Miranda swivelled around on the barstool to face Monty, her tanned legs crossed, one high-heeled sandal hanging from her foot and dangling seductively towards him. Already working hard at getting the possession charges dropped, Stevie thought. ‘It’s worth a lot of money,’ Miranda added.

Breightling palmed his forehead with exasperation. ‘Can we please return to the subject of my daughter’s disappearance, Inspector?’

‘Certainly, Mr Breightling, where were we?’ Monty knew very well where they were. ‘Ah yes, we were trying to ascertain your daughter’s frame of mind, wondering if she might have run away. Sergeant Hooper was under the impression that Emma was unhappy, that she didn’t want to go east to boarding school.’

‘I’m sorry, but that’s simply ridiculous. Emma is an extremely gifted child,’ Christopher Breightling told them. ‘She really finds it natural to want to learn, to achieve. The boarding school she’ll be going to has an extensive gifted program.’

Miranda said, ‘She couldn’t wait to go, she never shut up about it—that’s true isn’t it, Aidan?’ To Stoppard again, not the husband, Stevie noted.

Stoppard nodded. Stevie looked at Christopher Breightling. His knuckles were white, and a complex mixture of emotions played across his face.

‘Then is there something else she might have been unhappy about?’ Stevie’s look burned into Stoppard. He turned his palms to each parent and shrugged, as if to say, why’s she got it in for me?