Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

The Lost Girl by Robert Barnard

A recipient of the 2003 Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association, Robert Barnard continues to write at the top of his form. His latest novel to see print in the U.K. is The Killing in Jubilee Terrace (Allison & Busby, January). We have several more of his delightfully acerbic stories in inventory, for publication later this year, including a Mozart story from the series he writes as Bernard Bastable.

“You must be very worried,” said Inspector Paulson.

“Worried? ’Course I’m worried. Worried sick.” The elderly woman picked another Malteser from the bright red bag. “I was always telling her, but it made no difference. Just won’t listen, young people.”

“She surely knew that she ought to ring you and tell you where she was.”

“Oh, course she knew. Just didn’t think. Didn’t consider my feelings, and how I’d be worried out of my mind.”

Her eyes strained towards the clock on the mantelpiece. Inspector Paulson knew the signs. Neighbours would be on the telly in five minutes’ time.

Annaleese Marriott had been reported missing on Saturday morning, three days after she had disappeared, by her grandmother. Her activities on the previous Wednesday had been investigated by the police, but they had come to a blank in the early evening. She had gone to work in a nearby small newsagent’s at eight o’clock in the morning, when the newsagent had gone out to deliver papers. This was a regular arrangement, and was rewarded by a pittance. In the afternoon she had gone to help in a corner shop, also a regular occurrence and also rewarded by a pittance. Neither of these regular employments were known to the Social Services office which paid her unemployment benefit. She had gone home for her “teas,” which was the last her grandmother was to see of her. She had gone with friends to a pub in Armley for a couple of hours, then had told them she was going to visit her other grandmother, living in Headingley. There were various buses or combinations of them she could take, but the most likely one was the thirty-eight.

Syd Galopoulos had come to Britain long ago from Cyprus, and he was a long-serving bus driver. He told Inspector Paulson what he could remember about Annaleese.

“It was the nine-thirty from town. Got to the KFC in Armley around nine-fifty. She’d been on my buses before. She smiled and waved her card. I smiled back and she went upstairs.”

“Was it a double-decker? At that time of night?”

“Often is late on, when there’s just a handful. They’re old as hell, and if you get a drunk with a knife who wants to carve up the upholstery it doesn’t matter so much as with a new bus.”

“Were there many on the bus?”

“Just four or five downstairs.”

“And upstairs?”

“Oh — the CCTV wasn’t working, so I don’t... Wait a minute, though. There was an elderly gent went up. I thought to myself: ‘You could save your legs, old chap, by staying down.’ But he didn’t. There’s a lot like it upstairs. Goes back to the time when that’s where you could smoke. They get a better view, without being seen so closely from outside. And some of them will still snatch a ciggie if they think the TV isn’t working.”

“Right. So there was just him and Annaleese.”

“So far as I remember.”

“Who got off first?”

“The girl got off at stop forty-two. I was surprised. She usually gets off at stop forty-seven.”

“Where are those two stops?”

“Forty-two is Backleigh Golf Course, forty-seven is Bellyard Road in Headingley.”

“Bellyard Road is her grandmother’s address — her father’s mother.”

“She got off there usually when she got that bus,” said Syd.

“And the elderly man?”

“Oh — I hadn’t thought about him... Wait... he got off at the same stop. Forty-two. But he didn’t start down the stairs till after the bus stopped — a lot of elderly people do that: fear of falling down if there’s a sharp braking. So he got off the bus a few seconds after the girl.”

“Did they go in the same direction?”

“Oh dear... No, I just can’t remember... But I’ve got a picture in my mind of the girl, standing with her back to one of the garden walls along the road there... like she was waiting, right?”

Inspector Paulson did not like it at all. He had a vision of the two people upstairs making a silent pact: I know you’re interested. I’m interested too. And getting off at a stop with plenty of greenery nearby.

He liked it still less when he had a second talk with her friend Collette Sprigs. She was the friend who had filled him in on Annaleese’s night at the pub with friends.

“I haven’t remembered anything else,” she said when she found him on her doorstep.

“It’s not about Wednesday night,” he said, after he had been led through to the sitting room, watched by the careful eye of Collette’s mother. “It’s about what sort of girl Annaleese was. Is.” He was glad that Collette thought before answering.

“You know when girls disappear or get murdered, someone describes her as fun-loving?”

“Yes. Was that the sort of girl Annaleese was?”

“No, it’s the sort of girl she wasn’t. No way. I don’t mean she went around moping all the time, but there was always something there — some thought, something she didn’t want to talk about.”

“Why was she living with her grandmother?”

“’Cos her family collapsed. Evaporated. First her father went, then her mother said she couldn’t cope with her, and went off to live with a Huddersfield man.”

“Was she bitter about that?”

“What do you think? She wouldn’t be over the moon, would she? She said her mother ‘didn’t give a toss’ about her, called her father a ‘bastard’, and said she’d never had a childhood like other children had. Yes, I’d say she was bitter.”

“Did she ever go into details?”

“No. Absolutely not. Never a hint. We guessed there’d been some kind of abuse, but we didn’t ask. Didn’t dare to, to tell the truth. She was good at shutting down entirely.”

“But she had two grandmothers.”

“That’s a laugh. The one she lived with hated having to provide a home for her, and was always encouraging her to get out, maybe find a man. The other one she visited to screw money out of.”

“How did she do that?”

“That’s her father’s mother. We wondered if there was a bit of blackmail involved: ‘sub me regular or I’ll go to the police about what my dad did to me.’”

“I see... Did Annaleese have any special boyfriend?”

“One she was sleeping with? Not regular, not at all. She did sleep with men or boys now and then, when she wanted something from them — money, going anywhere in their car, going on a shoplifting spree to one of the big supermarkets... But the boys always said she wasn’t interested.”

“In sex, or with them?”

“I don’t suppose they knew, or thought about it like that.”

“I must say I don’t like the sound of all this,” said Paulson. “She seems so vulnerable. Who else did she try and blackmail other than her grandmother? Blackmail, even small-scale blackmail, is a crime for professionals.”

“We never thought of her like that,” said Collette. “We just thought she’d come through things pretty strong.”

Inspector Paulson began to feel increasingly uneasy about Annaleese. He gave a small-scale press conference where he highlighted the man on the thirty-eight bus, asking him to come forward, asking if anyone reading the publicity knew of his likely identity. He got two or three really good likenesses of Annaleese, and asked anyone who had seen her in the last week to come forward.

Then he went to see her paternal grandmother.

Mrs. Knox was a hard-faced woman who let him in reluctantly and talked when possible in monosyllables, usually negative ones: No, she hadn’t seen her granddaughter on Wednesday night, no she hadn’t seen or heard from her subsequently. She knew of no trouble she was in. She was obviously a bitter, not a loving, grandparent.

“She came to see you fairly often, didn’t she?” Paulson asked.

“Aye. When she wanted anything,” was the tight-lipped reply.

“Her friends say you were generous to her with money.”

“Oh, they say that, do they? Well, I’m only a pensioner, and I’ve nothing tucked away. I gave her small sums now and then. Bus fares and that.”

“Did Annaleese have ways of getting money out of you?”

“I don’t know what you mean. She asked for it, that’s what she did.”

“But did she mention her father, and some knowledge she might have—”

That really did catch the woman on a weak side.

“Look,” she said, firing up, “I know my son and I love him. I know better than to take seriously the mucky imaginings of a teenage kid. I took no heed to it whatsoever. I blame the television. Anybody with a grubby tale to tell gets on TV to tell it, and the soaps aren’t much better. Some of the plots are nothing but disgusting.”

“Tell me,” said Paulson, getting up, “are you worried about your granddaughter?”

“Oh, she’ll turn up. Like a bad penny, I nearly said. She’s no sense of responsibility, and she’ll disappear or turn up just as she pleases.”

Paulson hoped she was right.

Amid a scattering of possible identifications Paulson picked out one that seemed to be promising. A woman in a block of flats in Headingley had called in about a man in the flat opposite her. He regularly used the buses, and often travelled back from Leeds in the late evening. The woman was new to the block, but neighbours told her he went to the railwaymen’s club, just next to the station. He’d been a train driver or guard in his working life. She didn’t like to be too specific on the phone, talking to a rookie constable whose inexperience showed, but she said “people talked about him” and asked to speak to the highest man on the case. It was not much, but Paulson decided to go and speak to her.

“I’ve nothing against him personally,” the neighbour said. “I’ve never done more than say ‘Good morning’ or ‘lovely day’ when we met.”

“Do you know his name?”

“Charlie Clark. Retired. I sometimes see him in the post office, collecting his pension. I haven’t seen him for a few days, but that’s not unusual. I’m not very mobile, and he uses a stick. We’re mostly shut indoors.”

“I see. You said you’d no reason yourself to think he might be the person we want to interview, but you told the constable you talked to that there was gossip about him”

“Yes, well... There’s gossip and gossip. Normally I wouldn’t pass on things like that, but in the circumstances... It’s the mothers waiting for young children at the end of the school day. There’s the Alderman Tupper Junior School and the Headingley High School pretty well next to each other. He often goes and stands near the others waiting for their littlies, but people say he’s really interested in the girls from the high school — most of them pass down that way, past the junior school on the way to the Kirkstall crossroads. They say he looks at them — you know, like he was hungry. Undressing them in his mind.”

“Hasn’t anyone talked to him?”

“Well, it’s not easy, is it? You don’t know what to say, how to put it. One mother did ask him if he was fond of children.”

“What did he say?”

“Made no bones about it. Said he was very fond of them, but he was sad because he never saw his granddaughter.”

“Why was that?”

“Said they lived too far away. Neither he nor his daughter had enough to cover the journey.”

“You can get very cheap rail fares if you book early. Especially if you’re an ex-railwayman, I would guess. What did this mother do?”

“There wasn’t much she could say. She couldn’t point out that he pretended to look at the juniors and nursery kids but in fact gave most of his attention to the seniors, the girls who are — what’s the word? — just coming to maturity.”

“Pubescent.”

“Yes, that’s it. She was young, wasn’t she — the one you’re looking for?”

“She’s young, but not that young. What I’m afraid of is that she was young enough. Young enough looking still to be attractive to him.”

When he got back to the station he checked up on Clark, C. Nothing on him at all. Totally unknown as far as the police were concerned. But Paulson had been interested in the neighbour’s story: the man not seen for several days (he could be lying dead in the flat, dead from natural causes or from suicide), his activities at the school gates, his possible alienation from his daughter — these couldn’t be said to add up to anything, but together they were suggestive. He applied for a search warrant for the man’s flat.

He wasn’t there, either dead or alive. No stretched-out body across the living room floor. Only worn, bulky furniture, a large but old television, a unit with a few ornaments, vases, and books. A cursory look at the last showed nothing with any sexual content: they were mostly sweaty, heavy-breathing, chase-across-Iceland thrillers. There were drawers with telephone directories and Yellow Pages, a very old passport, a broken cigarette lighter, a building-society book, and odds and ends. No photographic album, so no record of the younger Charlie, or his daughter.

Paulson sighed. There was no option: He would have to go through the odds and ends. He tried the envelopes first: his pension book, statements from his building society (never more than 100 pounds in credit) his union card and so on. Eventually, nearly the last, there was a flash of colour as he opened the flap.

Colour photographs. He flipped quickly through them: naked children, usually girls. They were not particularly pornographic: The children were not making sexual advances or feigning activities they were too young for. Paulson wondered where he had got them from. There was a shop right in the centre of town where he certainly could have got them — and much worse than these. Or he could have found a like-minded mate who specialised in photography.

He sighed and put the envelope in a plastic bag. He had the evidence for Clark’s interest in children. But Clark had been careful to keep nothing that would suggest an urge to kill them. Paulson thought with a heavy heart of all the children, many of them around twelve or thirteen, who had gone missing in the Leeds area and had never been heard of again. Often they had parents who were no more interested in them than Annaleese’s grandmother. Or indeed than Annaleese’s parents, who had made no contact with the police investigation.

Back at police headquarters he sat thinking in his chair. Nothing to connect this old man with violence or murder. But what about the daughter? Was she still alive and living at a distance as he had told the mother at the school gates? Not necessarily so: She could be dead, long dead maybe. And if there ever had been such a thing as a granddaughter, was she still alive? How on earth was he to trace either of them?

He was interrupted by the phone.

“Sir, I think this is for you. A Mr. Brown. He asked for the man in charge of the missing girl case. Yours is the highest profile.”

“Okay. Put him on.”

“Inspector Paulson, I believe?” came an elderly voice, making the Inspector wonder whether it was Charlie Clark. “I expect you know the Backleigh Golf Course?”

“Yes, of course. It’s not that far from the number forty-two bus stop, on the thirty-eight bus route.”

“That’s right. There’s a bit of waste ground the kids sometimes play on, and then the early holes. Now I’m a newcomer to golf, Inspector, and I’m not getting the hang of it very fast. I’m especially bad at teeing off. Still got the strength, but not a bit of the accuracy. They go off at all angles. That’s why my shot for the second hole went way off the green, and into a patch of trees, brambles, and plastic drink bottles between the golf course and the bit of waste ground.”

“And you found something?”

“I think so. I don’t want to look. There’s a filthy old blanket, probably been there for years and left by one of the rough sleepers. But underneath the blanket is something — not weeds or anything, but — well, I’ve felt with my iron and like I said, it doesn’t feel right. I’m there now.”

“Stay there. I’m coming right over.”

Twenty minutes later he was on the course, a bit away from the second fairway. Mr. Brown was a sharp-looking sixty-something, but there was no reason why a queasy stomach should not inhabit a strong body. They shook hands and Brown pointed with his iron to the undergrowth under some sycamore trees.

“You’ll see my ball there. I don’t think I’ll be playing any more today.”

Paulson followed the direction indicated, and saw the white ball waiting to be hit back into play. Then he looked at the brambles around it, growing with their usual speed and ferocity. Going closer, he saw that underneath the brambles were not soil or weeds but the old dirty blanket.

He went nearer. The blanket certainly covered something, and it was large enough to be a human body — not a large one, but probably a full-grown human being. No one had told him how large Annaleese was. Most of the blanket was tucked in around the object it covered, but in one place it had come away, and a fringed edge lay on the ground. Paulson stayed where he was, and used Brown’s iron to raise the edge of the blanket.

The sun obligingly pierced through the clouds and shone on the thing he had exposed to view. It was an old brown hand, the veins standing out, the knuckles skeletal, the fingers stained with nicotine.