Smoke and Mirrors (3 page)

Edgar arrived back at the station just as Bob and Emma appeared around the corner, heads down against the wind. It had actually stopped snowing but the wind was still whirling the flakes around as if it couldn’t decide on the correct place for them. Edgar watched his officers approach. Both had their hoods up, Bob in his absurd fisherman’s gear walking slightly ahead, Emma in her duffle coat following behind. There was something ecclesiastical about her hooded figure emerging through the snow. Appropriate really, considering that Bartholomew Square used to be the site of a monastery.

‘Did you leave the jeep on the race hill?’ Edgar asked Bob.

‘Yes, they’re still looking through the undergrowth there.’

‘Good.’ Edgar had sent his jeep to the park, to look again in the playground, shrubbery and formal garden. Usually they’d get the public to help with a search like this but the weather was making that impossible. The children’s parents and their friends were still combing the streets though, looking through gardens and outhouses, continuing to hope that somewhere the runaways would be found, cold and frightened but still alive. For Edgar, though he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, that hope had faded hours ago.

‘Let’s get inside,’ he said. ‘You look frozen.’

‘We’re OK,’ said Emma, whose nose was bright pink. ‘It’s quite bracing really.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Bob. Edgar wondered whether he’d done the right thing in sending them off together.

The subterranean CID offices, unbearable in summer, felt like an oasis of warmth. Someone made tea and they sat drinking it, clothes steaming, condensation forming on the walls. Bob munched slowly through his sandwiches. It was two o’clock.

‘Right,’ said Edgar. ‘What have we got?’

Emma told him about the acting troupe.

‘It’s interesting that Annie wrote the plays even if they never actually put them on.’

‘Oh, they put them on all right.’ As succinctly as he could, he described the garage theatre.

‘That is perverted,’ said Bob, ‘building a place like that just to entice little kids in. He sounds like our man to me.’

‘There’s no “our man”,’ said Edgar irritably. ‘This isn’t a murder investigation.’ The ‘yet’ floated in the air. ‘And I didn’t think Brian Baxter was perverted. A little strange, certainly, a little obsessive. But he spoke about the children with real fondness.’

‘All the more reason to suspect him,’ said Bob, whose mind could be a dark place sometimes.

‘What about the shopkeeper, Sam Gee?’ said Edgar. ‘Did you talk to him again?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘He said that he didn’t see Annie and Mark on Monday. We managed to trace some other children who were in the shop and they hadn’t seen them either. Last sighting was on the corner of St Luke’s Terrace. They’re all a bit hazy about time but we think it was about five o’clock because they said the number 12 bus went past a few minutes later. I checked the timetable.’

Once again, Edgar was impressed by Emma’s thoroughness. ‘Good work. What were the children doing in St Luke’s Terrace?’

‘Talking, somebody said. But someone else said that they may have been arguing.’

‘That’s interesting. Who said that?’

Emma took out her notebook and flipped through the pages. ‘Arthur Bates, aged ten. He was coming back from the park with his younger sister, Karen. Arthur said that they were standing on the street corner and he heard Annie say that Mark should “go back to primary school”.’

‘That’s a big insult when you’re twelve,’ said Bob.

‘Did this Arthur hear anything else?’ asked Edgar.

‘No. He said that they stayed on the corner, talking. Well, he said that he only heard Annie’s voice.’

This fitted so well with the picture that Edgar had built up of Mark Webster that he almost felt tears coming to his eyes.

‘Were there any sightings after five o’clock?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Emma. ‘We spoke to a few people who’d been walking dogs in the park but it was dark and cold. No one saw the children but maybe no one was looking.’

‘I’ve got people searching the park again,’ said Edgar. Had the children gone back to the park? As Emma said, it was dark and cold, but they might have had their reasons for wanting to be on their own. Maybe Frank Hodges was right and they were in the throes of a pre-teen romance. But Edgar still didn’t think this was likely. Everything he had heard cast Annie in the role of leader and Mark as follower. Nothing about their relationship suggested Romeo and Juliet. It was more Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

‘Did you get anything more from the children at the school?’ he asked.

‘Not really,’ said Bob. ‘But they all seemed a bit wary, especially the older ones. They opened up a bit when they told us about the play-acting but I got the impression that they were holding something back.’

‘Didn’t you try to get it out of them?’ asked Edgar.

Emma coloured. ‘I did try . . .’

‘Sergeant Holmes was very good with them,’ said Bob unexpectedly. ‘She got right down to their level. They trusted her.’

Emma shot him a grateful look. Edgar felt a bit ashamed of his question but he was frustrated by the feeling that they were missing something, something momentous just out of their line of sight, like a great cloven hoof in the doorway.

‘Tell me again about the play Annie wrote,’ he said.

Emma looked at her notes again. ‘It was called
The Stolen Children
. Louise and Agnes were the children, Richard and Betty were the parents. Lionel was the policeman. Kevin, one of the older children, was the villain, the Witch Man. Everyone thinks that the Witch Man has stolen the children but really the parents have killed them.’

‘Good God,’ said Edgar.

‘There was this really chilling little rhyme,’ said Emma. ‘I wrote it down.
Children, children, say your prayers. Children, children, stay upstairs. Children dear, don’t stay out late, or the Wicked Witch Man will be your fate.
’

‘Good God,’ said Edgar again.

‘Betty said that Annie loved a story with a twist,’ said Bob.

‘Betty is Annie’s little sister?’

‘Yes, Betty and Richard. They’re twins. There’s a baby brother too.’

Edgar thought of the photograph in Annie’s grandparents’ house. The four red-haired children posing together in perfect harmony.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘do you suspect the parents?’ He raised his hand to stop their protests. ‘In cases like this it is often the parents, you know. It’s horrible but there it is.’

‘I know the figures,’ said Emma, ‘but I can’t believe it in this case. The parents all seem so distraught.’

‘And why would they kill them?’ asked Bob. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

‘No,’ Edgar agreed. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ He looked at the clock. Two-thirty. Soon it would be forty-eight hours since the last sighting of the children. ‘I think I’ll talk to the parents again.’

*

He walked up to Freshfield Road. It was hard going. Although the snow had stopped, it was still several inches deep with drifts as high as Edgar’s waist in some places. The main roads had been cleared but, as Edgar climbed the hill leading to the racecourse, cars were marooned in mounds of snow and only criss-crossing lines of footprints broke the whiteness. As he approached Mark’s parents’ house, a sledge shot past him containing two yelling children. Edgar watched them sourly, envying them their carefree enjoyment of the snow. Did they know that two children were missing, possibly buried under this magical winter wonderland? Did they care? He plodded on, Russian hat pulled down over his ears.

Mark’s mother took a step backwards when she saw the fur hat on her doorstep.

‘Mrs Webster?’ Edgar hurried to remove it. ‘Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens. We met yesterday. There’s no more news,’ he said hastily, seeing her face, ‘but I just wondered if I could ask you a few questions. Is your husband in?’

‘He’s gone up to the race hill to join in the search,’ said Mrs Webster. ‘The army are up there, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘And it’s stopped snowing. That should make things easier.’

‘Yes, it should.’ Edgar offered to take off his wet shoes. At least if he was stooping to undo the laces, he could avoid seeing the desperate hope in Edna Webster’s eyes.

‘Don’t bother, honestly. Reg and his mates have been tramping in and out all day.’ Reg was her husband, a bus driver.

Edgar sat opposite Edna in the tiny front room. A large photograph of Mark smiled at them from the mantelpiece. He was an only child.

‘We tried for such a long time to have a baby,’ Edna told him. ‘And we just weren’t blessed. But then Mark came along.’

Edgar tried not to think about what it would mean to this woman if her precious, miracle child had been killed. He wondered about the word ‘blessed’. Were the Websters religious? There were no crucifixes or signs of Catholic regalia around but maybe they belonged to one of those dour Nonconformist sects.

‘I just wanted to talk to you about Mark,’ said Edgar. ‘We’re building up a picture of the children and any little thing you can tell us might be helpful. I understand Mark is quite a shy boy.’

‘Yes.’ Edna’s hands twisted a cushion as she spoke. She looked like a woman who never sat with her hands still. Edgar’s mother was the same.

‘Reg used to get impatient sometimes because he wasn’t one for the rough and tumble. He didn’t like football and boxing and what have you. He liked reading.’

She said it like it was something shameful. Edgar smiled encouragingly. ‘I liked reading as a boy too, Mrs Webster.’ Although he might have liked some rough and tumble if the chance had come his way.

‘When did Mark and Annie become friends?’ he asked.

‘Oh, they were friends since kindergarten,’ said Edna proudly. ‘Annie took him under her wing from the start.’

‘Under her wing?’

‘Some of the bigger boys used to bully Mark because he wore glasses but Annie always stuck up for him. She’s a feisty little thing. And so clever.’

‘Mark must be clever too,’ said Edgar. ‘He got into the grammar school.’

‘Oh, that was Annie,’ said Edna. ‘She carried him through the eleven-plus. She was so determined that he wouldn’t be left behind.’

He wasn’t left behind, thought Edgar. Annie had always taken Mark with her, even on that fateful day. Maybe it would have been better for him if Annie hadn’t carried him along in her slipstream. Maybe even now he’d be sitting safely at home with his mother.

‘I understand they like to put on plays,’ he said.

‘Oh yes,’ said Edna. ‘They do them at Uncle Brian’s house. He’s got a proper little theatre in his garage. You ought to see it.’

‘I have,’ said Edgar. He paused. Edna obviously didn’t see anything sinister in the connection with ‘Uncle’ Brian and he didn’t want to put the thought in her head. All the same, there were questions he had to ask.

‘Do you know Brian Baxter well?’ he said at last.

‘Not very well,’ said Edna. ‘I went to his house last summer to see a play Annie was putting on. It was called
Red as a Rose
. Sweetly pretty, it was. All the little ones played different flowers. Brian seemed a very nice man. Educated. He worked in an office, you know.’

She said this in a tone of hushed awe. The lustre of a white-collar job was obviously enough to put Brian Baxter above suspicion.

‘Have you heard anything about the play they’re working on at the moment?’

‘No,’ said Edna. ‘They’re always quite secretive. No one must see it “in rehearsal”, that’s what Annie says. She’s a caution.’

Bob and Emma had said that the children had seemed reluctant to talk about the play. Was this just loyalty to their leader? Or was something else troubling the cast?

‘How well do you know Annie’s parents?’ he asked.

‘Not very well. We keep ourselves to ourselves really.’

Is that possible, thought Edgar, on a street like this? On the other hand, his own mother had made every effort to avoid her neighbours whenever possible. Maybe the Websters, a quiet couple with an only child, were the same.

‘Did you ever chat with Sandra Francis, about the children maybe?’

‘Sometimes. She seems a nice woman. Her father was a teacher, you know.’

‘And Jim?’

‘I don’t really know Jim at all. I mean, he’s a labourer . . .’

Her voice died away, leaving Edgar to guess at the layers of class distinction involved. Clearly Reg Webster, as a bus driver, rated above Jim Francis, a manual labourer, even if his wife was the daughter of a teacher.

‘Must be difficult for the Francises,’ he said casually, ‘with all those children.’

Edna said nothing, twisting the cushion round and round.

‘Annie must like coming here.’

Edna smiled. ‘Yes. Sometimes she says she doesn’t want to go home.’

‘Does she? Why?’

‘I don’t know. I think her parents can be strict.’

‘Jim? Her dad?’

‘More her mother, I think. She expects a lot from Annie. She’s the eldest, of course.’

‘Has Annie ever said anything to Mark about her parents? Anything to show she’s scared of them?’

Edna smiled sadly. ‘Even if she had, Mark would never tell me. He knows how to keep a secret, does Mark.’

That seemed an odd thing to say about a child. Edgar was about to ask more when a sound outside made Edna cock her head, listening.

‘It’s Reg,’ she said.

Edgar knew that Edna was hoping that her husband would come in with some news, a sighting or a witness or even just a report that the weather was lifting. Even Edgar was half hoping, although he knew that if there had been news Reg Webster would have shouted it out, rather than clumping about in the hall taking his boots off.

Reg entered the room in his stockinged feet, a thin wiry man who looked some years older than his wife.

‘Anything?’ asked Edna, still with that unbearable tinge of hope in her voice.

‘Nothing,’ said Reg. ‘We went right to the top of the race hill, all along the number 2 route. Searched the scrubland by the stables, everything.’

‘The army will keep looking,’ said Edgar, trying to inject some confidence into his voice. ‘They’re experts at this kind of thing.’