Child's Play Page 4

  Once the girls filed from the refectory, she gathered the staff about her own table. ‘While I am not blaming anyone,’ she began, ‘unfortunately, neither the police nor Sukie’s family feel similarly charitable. I hope Sukie’s disappearance is nothing more than a silly prank; however, it may prove to be something far more worrying and we must, therefore, make every effort to contain its potential for serious damage to our school.’

  There was little response, except for fretful mutterings here and there, and suddenly she felt terribly isolated. Looking critically at the women around her, she realised they expected her to shoulder the full burden. Already they were retreating, building redoubts in which to hide until the crisis was resolved.

  When Freya left the refectory for her study, only Matron followed. Bristling with defensive agitation, she rejected every implicit rebuke in the headmistress’s comments to her staff.

  ‘And it’s not fair to say I’m in the best position to know if a girl is upset or worried,’ she insisted. ‘What about the house captains? The form teachers? Anyway, Sukie never said a word about being worried or upset and nor did anyone else!’ She took a deep, fortifying breath. ‘And I don’t like being pilloried in front of everyone for doing my job as I see fit. Why should Mrs Derringer object to me calling the doctor to Alice? I’m perfectly qualified to know when a doctor’s needed.’

  Watching the older woman’s turned-down mouth and disapproving eyes, Freya wondered if, disarmed by the facade, she had made the mistake of excluding her from that quiet early pogrom of staff. ‘I merely said you should have told me first.’ She fiddled with a leather-bound appointments book, fighting the desire to bully, which Matron always provoked. ‘And do stop calling Alice’s mother Mrs Derringer. You know perfectly well she reverted to her maiden name of Rathbone a long time ago. Please don’t make another gaffe when she next visits.’

  ‘When’s that likely to be? Next blue moon?’

  ‘She’s a very busy woman.’

  ‘Don’t we know it!’ Matron said sourly. ‘Jetting to America, jetting to the Far East, jetting here, there and everywhere except to see her only child now and then.’

  ‘She pays us to look after Alice.’

  ‘Caretakers! That’s all we are. What that wee bairn needs is some proper mothering.’

  ‘The other day,’ Freya reminded her silkily, ‘you said that “wee bairn” is a “headstrong little madam in need of a good smacked bottom”. Do make up your mind.’

  Matron flushed beetroot red. ‘That was because she cheeked me when I told her off for behaving like a hoyden, but whether I like the way she behaves or not, she’s not a well child. Apart from these headaches, her asthma’s getting worse.’ She pursed her lips. ‘It’ll be on our heads when something happens,’ she added darkly.

  ‘Her asthma is always worse at this time of the year. She also gets hay fever, which results in blocked sinuses. Hence the headaches, no doubt.’

  ‘The doctor didn’t think so,’ Matron said, reclaiming lost ground. ‘She says Alice needs glasses.’

  ‘Something simple, nonetheless,’ Freya murmured. ‘Have you made an optician’s appointment?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Patting her collar, Matron elevated her stately bosom to check that the big silver clasp on her elastic belt sat dead-centre. Then she twitched her apron into place across her ample lap. ‘Do the police intend to interview the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘I imagine that will depend on what transpires from the search.’

  ‘Only if they are, you’d better make sure that young sergeant knows his place. Despite the fact I’d already hauled him over the coals for gossiping to Alice and Daisy, Rosemary Bebb saw him flirting with Torrance on his way out.’

  Irritably Freya said, ‘I think the possible effect of a good-looking young man on a bunch of impressionable girls is the least of our worries at present.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ Matron commented, nodding vigorously. ‘Whatever else Sukie might do, she wouldn’t run away and leave her horse.’ She paused, to give full weight to her next words. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling in my bones about this. I think she’s been kidnapped.’

  ‘That would be a most foolish, and dangerous, suggestion to broadcast.’ Eyes and face stony, Freya added, ‘There is absolutely nothing — nothing — to indicate abduction, as I have already told the police. They agree with me that a ransom demand would have been sent by now, either to us or to Sukie’s parents. In any case,’ she went on, barely able to contain her anger, ‘the precarious state of the Melville finances is no secret.’

  ‘What about Lady Hester’s parents, though?’ Matron insisted. ‘They’re certainly not—’

  Freya cut her off in mid-sentence. ‘You will not discuss abduction and that is an order! Do you understand?’ As the other woman blinked back tears of shock, Freya turned the knife. ‘You overreact, you have too much fondness for emotional dramatics and your viewpoints are frighteningly limited, and that is why, for instance, you refuse to see some of the school traditions for the perfectly natural assessment processes that they are. You seem to forget, Matron, that we are paid to make these girls fit to take their proper place at the head of society. Better the weak fall by the wayside here, rather than where it might actually matter.’

  Without a word, humiliated and diminished, Matron struggled to her feet. Wrenching open the door, she stumbled blindly into the corridor, asking herself how much longer she could tolerate the ruthlessness behind the fancy notions and long words with which the headmistress beguiled everyone within the school. The answer was always the same; she would bear it as long as she must, for she had no place in the terrifying world outside.

  Deaf to the noises from the corridor, Freya stared through the window, but saw nothing of the glorious view or the banks of rhododendron and azalea blossoms, and even the hundreds of early-flowering roses unfolding their petals to the sun might have been but a few withered leaves for all the notice she took. She thought of the absent Sukie, feeling not curious, or worried, but angry and resentful and rather frightened, for if someone in the school knew what had befallen the girl there had been a revolution in the balance of power.

  4

  Before leaving to co-ordinate the search, Jack dropped a handful of leaflets on McKenna’s desk. ‘Something to kick-start your house hunting,’ he said. ‘I got them from the agent round the corner.’

  Eventually McKenna responded. ‘Thanks,’ he muttered.

  Jack made for the door. ‘Think nothing of it.’ By the time he reached the head of the stairs, he was grinding his jaw with suppressed fury.

  Without a vestige of enthusiasm, McKenna glanced at photographs, scanned paragraphs of estate-agent-speak and decided very quickly, and with some relief, that not one of the houses appealed to him. He dropped the leaflets into the waste bin.

  While he smoked the second of the ten cigarettes of his self-imposed daily allowance, he reread the information sheet tucked inside the box of nicotine patches he had bought last Saturday. The patches made his skin itch, they were expensive, his throat was sore and he had a persistent, nagging headache and, as he stubbed out the cigarette, he wondered why he was bothering. The business of the house was part of the same picture, a dismal rendering of an impoverished life. He recognised his despondency, yet saw no point in trying to alter his state of mind any more than he would voluntarily move from his rickety old house. He had no parents, no siblings, no wife, no children; no one in whom to invest himself and his past for their present or future. He had no one to care for and no one cared for him, and all the emotion left over from the huge amount he lavished on Fluff and Blackie, his two rescued cats, was of necessity sealed inside. Or was it? he wondered. Perhaps it had leaked away and he was truly as drained as he felt.

  Towards two that afternoon, Divisional HQ passed on the news that the body of a young female had been washed up in Caernarfon, near the floating restaurant at the mouth of the River Seiont.

  5

  The floatin
g restaurant was towed downstream from its winter berth every Easter and moored for the summer months in the lea of the harbour walls, and although partly in the shadow of the castle’s lofty Eagle Tower, it offered fine views of the Aber foreshore and an uninterrupted prospect across the water to the south-western shores of Anglesey.

  Pedestrians and cyclists could cross the river mouth by way of a bridge that swung back and forth on hydraulic capstans at regular intervals to let the yachts, fishing smacks and tourist launches come and go. On the far side of the bridge a narrow road, hugging the foreshore, trailed around a bluff of land and was quickly out of sight, and it was here the body had finally made landfall, tossed carelessly by the incoming tide on to a seaweed-draped litter of rocks that shelved steeply towards the water.

  High on the Eagle Tower, the halyard pinged against the flagpole, the fearsome red dragon emblazoned on the flag writhing and lashing its tail as a stiff breeze tugged the fabric this way and that. Making his way across the bridge, McKenna could hear the whiplash snap of the flag punctuating the murmur of voices from the crowd that had materialised on the quayside, drawn by the smell of drama. In the distance a siren wailed and behind him waves slapped rhythmically at the harbour walls, raising spray. When he rounded the bluff he saw another cluster of onlookers, held at bay by a lone policeman. Further down the road cars, motorcycles and the odd camper van were being turned back the way they had come.

  The paraphernalia of death and investigation looked insignificant, he thought, against the backdrop of a huge sky and an endless expanse of glittering water. A small white tent lapped by tiny waves sat crookedly on the rocks inside a cordon of blue and white tape, two scenes of crime personnel in white overalls picked over the ground, while several police officers stood about rather aimlessly, waiting to be told what to do. Right at the edge of the water the local superintendent and the harbour master gazed out to sea, speaking in low voices. Slithering and sliding on the rocks, McKenna joined them.

  ‘You’d think this was the latest tourist attraction, wouldn’t you?’ the superintendent remarked nastily, staring at the onlookers with his face expressing his disgust. ‘Bloody ghouls!’

  ‘It’s human nature to be curious,’ McKenna said. He nodded towards the overalled investigators. ‘Have they found anything?’

  ‘No,’ the superintendent said shortly. ‘And in the half-hour or so they’ve got left before peak tide I don’t expect they will.’ Morosely, he surveyed the activities. ‘Aside from that, tipping a body in water is a sure-fire way of destroying evidence, which is something your perpetrator might well know.’

  ‘There might not he a “perpetrator”,’ McKenna pointed out. ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘On the way to the morgue. Like I said, high tide’s imminent. Didn’t want her washed back out to sea, did we?’

  ‘There was no point in keeping her here,’ the harbour master added. ‘The police surgeon says she’s been dead at least twenty-four hours and, that being the case, it’s most unlikely that she entered the water anywhere in this vicinity.’

  ‘Where, then?’ asked McKenna.

  ‘Upstream, most probably, and on this side of the Strait.’ The harbour master turned to follow the progress of an ocean-going cruiser cutting an arrogant dash through the waves. ‘Once I’ve had a proper look at the tidal charts, I’ll get together with the pathologist.’

  Before responding, McKenna watched the cruiser change course, preparatory to entering the river mouth. ‘She could have come from the Irish Sea,’ he said.

  ‘Unlikely.’ The harbour master shook his head. ‘Those bodies usually make landfall on the Anglesey coast, or down Cardigan Bay way.’ He touched McKenna’s shoulder and pointed across the water, where the tidal flow and the vicious undertows that characterised the Strait were clearly visible. ‘You can see from here how the tide runs; up and down and round and round.’ He paused. ‘Coming back up the Strait, it meets resistance from the river, which makes it slow down somewhat, creating an eddy. So, if there’s anything heavy in the water, this is where it generally gets dropped.’

  ‘Who found her?’ McKenna asked, looking once more towards the watchers.

  ‘Not one of them,’ the harbour master told him. ‘She’d have been invisible from the road. A coastguard patrol on its way out to Llanddwyn Island spotted her.’

  *

  The pathology laboratories and mortuary were tucked away behind the accident department at Bangor’s district general hospital. Once inside the innocuous-looking building, McKenna announced himself at the desk in the foyer, and within minutes a gowned and gloved technician poked his head round the mortuary door and beckoned him inside.

  Dogged by a photographer, Dr Eifion Roberts, the senior pathologist, was pacing slowly up and down beside one of the autopsy tables on which lay the body so recently given up by the sea. Now and then he stooped low to scrutinise the sodden, filthy garments, apparently oblivious to the stench of salt water, sediments and rotting flesh that reached McKenna almost as a memory after most of its reality had been vacuumed away by the pumps beneath the table.

  Roberts glanced round and said, above the dull roar of the pumps, ‘If you want to come closer, you’ll have to get gowned up. I don’t want the body contaminated.’

  ‘I just want to make an identification,’ McKenna told him. ‘Or not, as the case may be.’

  ‘Isn’t that a job for the foot soldiers, rather than the general?’

  Staring beyond the pathologist to the autopsy table, McKenna replied, ‘Most of the foot soldiers are out, searching the Hermitage and its environs for a pupil last seen around eleven on Tuesday night.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Got a picture?’

  He handed over Sukie’s portrait. ‘She was apparently dressed in an oversized white T-shirt that she wore to bed and a striped silk dressing gown. And slippers, presumably. She’d just come from the showers.’

  Roberts looked at the portrait. Gently pushing aside the tangled hair, he examined the mottled, dirt-streaked face. ‘You’ll have to get a formal ID from someone who knew her, but to my mind there’s no doubt. The time fits, too. She’s been in the water forty-eight hours at the absolute outside and probably quite a bit less.’ He fingered the clothing. ‘This may well be the same T shirt, but she’d put on jeans and trainers.’ Then he raised the hem of the shirt and hooked his finger under the waistband of the jeans. ‘She’s also wearing underpants, but no brassiere.’ Standing back from the table for the photographer, he asked, ‘What’s the likely score? Suicide, homicide or accident?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. We’re depending on you to show us the way.’

  ‘You’ve a wait on your hands, then. There’s nothing like water for messing up evidence.’

  McKenna nodded. ‘So I’ve already been told. I’ll get Jack to bring in the headmistress to identify her, then you can start the autopsy.’

  6

  By four o’clock, Jack had called to confirm that the body in the mortuary was indeed Sukie’s. McKenna set in motion the mechanics of an investigation made daunting by the prospect of interviewing and protecting almost three hundred potential witnesses, and of probing an equal number of possible suspects. Discussing strategy, manpower and cost over the telephone with the deputy chief constable, he was reminded not to overlook the extreme sensitivity of this particular situation and so, harnessing the other man’s worries to extract more resources, he said, ‘Until cause of death is known, we presume homicide, as usual. I need a mobile incident room and enough personnel to leave a contingent of officers on twenty-four-hour guard duty. I’d also be grateful,’ he added, ‘if you’d deal with both the school governors and the media. As you say, it’s a sensitive situation and the kind of thing that sets the media salivating. A brief statement about the girl’s death and our continuing enquiries should suffice for now.’

  Jack caught the tail end of the conversation as he walked in. He took off his
jacket, slung it over a chair and sat down.

  ‘Where’s the headmistress?’ asked McKenna.

  ‘I stuck her in the CID room with Janet and a hot drink. She’s very, very shaken. She’s also desperate to get back to spread the sad tidings.’

  McKenna glanced at his watch, then reached for a cigarette. After some moments of silence, he said, ‘We’ll start as we mean to go on; in other words take control from the outset.’ He coughed, then put the cigarette in an ashtray. ‘When you go back to the school,’ he went on, ‘get the staff and girls together, and tell them only that Sukie’s been found dead. Nothing else.’

  ‘Questioning them all is going to be a logistical nightmare.’ Pausing to loosen his tie, Jack added, ‘If I rope in everyone apart from the dog handlers, I’ll have twenty-one bodies, which should be enough to start on the staff and sixth formers, with a few spare to keep tabs on the rest. That said,’ he went on, ‘at least half the officers are due off shift in the next few hours.’

  ‘I’ve been promised all the help and manpower we need, so just dangle the overtime carrot.’ McKenna retrieved the cigarette. ‘The most pressing dilemma is how we interrogate over two hundred juveniles while maintaining their right to have the support of an independent adult.’

  ‘Do we need to bother at this stage?’ Jack argued. ‘We won’t be asking anything contentious in the first round and, depending on the autopsy findings, maybe not at all.’

  ‘Yes, we do need to bother. We need to be fireproof. The deputy chief is rounding up a posse of social workers and solicitors to sit in with the girls.’

  ‘And after all that, we’ll probably find Sukie fell into the water when she was up to some mischief or threw herself off Menai Bridge. Or Britannia Bridge, as it’s nearer.’ He grimaced. ‘Poor kid.’