On such a night it was a joy to be walking slowly through these ancient spaces, but as she did so, Freya’s mind was filled again with the two missing women. They had been walking or running somewhere alone – but then what had happened and where were they now, safe or in danger, alive or dead? She shivered, not because she was afraid, especially not here in a sacred and protected place, but because inevitably her professional mind returned again to scenes of violence and its aftermath. This was the first case since she had come to Lafferton which had engaged her as fully as many of those she had dealt with in the Met. In spite of herself, she had begun to identify with the two women. She felt under a personal obligation to them. She must do for them what they could not do for themselves.
The search of the Hill had been called off when it grew dark. Nothing had been found. It would be resumed at daybreak and continue either until there was something or the whole area had been combed without result.
She walked the last few yards to her car. She wanted to clear her mind of the case and she could not, would not, now, until it was resolved one way or another. That was the nature of the job and her own nature too. A DI at the Met had once told her it was her weakness.
‘To climb right up the ranks you’ve got to learn detachment, Freya, and you don’t seem able to do that. You can’t leave things at the end of the day. You take them home. You take them to supper, you take them to bed with you. You’ll burn out.’
In a sense, that was exactly what she had done – burned out of the Met. But Lafferton had given her a new life and a new sense of commitment. She knew she let some cases get to her, take her over, insinuate themselves into her dreams, but she was what she was and forcing herself into a different mould would be a betrayal. It would also, she was sure, make her a less effective officer.
Thinking deeply, she took a step off the path as a car swung round the corner, picking her up in its headlights. Freya turned as the driver braked and hooted.
‘Freya?’
She was blinded by the glare. The window of the silver BMW slid down as the headlamps dipped.
‘Who is this?’
But as she took a couple of steps nearer she saw him with a shock of pleasure.
‘Sir?’
‘What are you doing walking in the close alone?’
‘Coming from a choir practice in the cathedral. I was so late I couldn’t get a space so I had to park my car down here.’
‘Was my mother singing?’
‘Not half. She’s gone to the Cross Keys with the others but I didn’t feel like it tonight.’
‘Hang on.’
He swung his car into a space beside one of the darkened houses, switched off the engine and got out.
‘Are you here to look for Meriel?’
He laughed. ‘No, to come home. I live here.’
‘Good heavens. I didn’t think anyone did, I thought this end of the close was just offices.’
‘Pretty much. There are offices and there’s me. The clergy are all at the top end near the cathedral.’
‘Well, well.’
‘Come up and see. Come and have a drink at the end of a bad day.’
How easy momentous words often sounded, she thought, how casually spoken a sentence which she would carry with her like a precious object perhaps for the rest of her life. ‘Come up and see. Come and have a drink.’ She followed him into the dark, silent building and up the stairs, looking at his back, his head, the white-blond hair, his long legs, the shoes he wore, the colour of his socks, remembering, remembering. When you were young you pinched yourself to see if this was really happening, if you were you and awake and alive. Now, she could scarcely breathe but the sense of unreality was the same, the disbelief, the heightened awareness. The joy.
Serrailler. She stared at his name on the plate beside the door. Serrailler. The letters were not ordinary letters. The name was illuminated. Serrailler.
He walked in ahead of her. Lights went on. Freya stood in the doorway of a room that took the rest of her breath away.
He glanced at her and smiled, the smile he had which lit up his face, the whole room, the space between them. ‘Drink? Coffee?’
‘It had better be coffee,’ she said. Her voice sounded odd but he seemed not to notice.
‘Do you mind if I have a whisky?’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Sit down.’
He went through a door on the left. More lights, brighter lights on pale walls. The kitchen.
Freya went to the window. The shutters were open and she looked down into the still, lamplit Cathedral Close. In spite of the emotion of being here, in this amazing room at Simon Serrailler’s invitation, in spite of her shaking hands, it was the missing women who filled her thoughts again. She feared for them, and the frustration of knowing nothing, having discovered nothing, was unbearable. Every hour that passed meant time during which something might have been done, something vital uncovered. She had gone over and over the case notes, trying to see something she might have missed. She turned and looked again at the room. It was perfect. It had everything she might have chosen, but designed and arranged better than she could have done it – furniture, rugs, pictures, books, the lighting exactly right, the spaces between exactly right. She walked across to look at a set of four framed drawings in a group above the chocolate-brown leather sofa. They were of Venice – the domes of Santa Maria Salute and San Giorgio Maggiore, plus two churches she did not know, the line vibrant and clear, the detail minute and yet beautifully economical. The initials SO were just visible in each lower right-hand corner.
‘Here we are.’ He came out of the kitchen with a tray and set down cafetière, milk and sugar and small pottery mug on the low table.
‘Who did these? I love them.’
‘I did.’
‘I didn’t realise.’
‘Intent to deceive … O is my middle initial.’
‘Simon, they’re beautiful. What are you doing in the police force?’
‘Ah, but would I enjoy art so much if I did it twenty-four/seven? Drawing keeps me sane.’ He went to a white-painted cube on the wall, opened the front and took out a whisky bottle and glass.
‘Do you paint as well?’
‘No. It’s line I love – I work in pencil, pen and charcoal, never colour.’
‘How long have you done it?’
‘Always. I went to art school but I left because no one was interested in drawing or the teaching of drawing. It was a bad time. Everyone wanted conceptual stuff. Installation art. I wasn’t interested.’
‘But then –’ Freya sat down on the sofa – ‘the police force?’
‘I went to university to read law so that I could come in on fast track as a graduate. It was always either drawing or policing.’
‘But your parents are doctors.’
‘My entire family going back three generations have been medics. I’m the black sheep.’
‘I’d have thought you were a refreshing change.’
‘My mother has come round to seeing it a bit like that now.’
‘Your father?’
‘No.’
He said it in a way that defied her to ask more. She did not, but pressed the plunger on her cafetière and watched it sink slowly down, crushing the layer of coffee grains to the bottom.
Simon took the deep easy chair opposite to her, crossed his long legs easily, and leaned back, whisky in hand. She could scarcely breathe. It was not possible to look at him.
‘I didn’t get back to the Hill before the search was called off but I presume nothing was found?’
‘Nothing at all.’ She poured her coffee to keep her head down, her hand shaking.
She wanted him to talk, to get to know the sound of his voice so well that when she had left here she would be able to hear it exactly, carry it with her.
‘But we’re off duty. How long have you been a choral singer?’
An hour and a half later, Freya had talked about herself and her past life more intimately than she had ever talked to anyone. Simon was a listener, prompting only occasionally and then with nothing more than a word or two, looking at her all the time as she spoke. She found herself talking about her family, her training, the Met, her marriage and its breakdown, and wanting to go on and on, wanting him to know her and everything about her. After a while, she was able to glance at him, to look at his face in the light from the angled lamp behind his chair, in profile, as he drank his whisky, as he faced her again.
She was absolutely in love with him, she knew that now, but tonight had changed things. She no longer wanted to reject this, to swear it away, no longer said Damn, Damn, Damn at the thought and the sight of him and the acute awareness of her reaction. She had never known a man who had given her such full and concentrated attention, who had listened to her and looked at her in this way, as if she were important, what she said mattered and there was nothing else and no one else of interest to him in the world.
The cathedral bells chimed midnight, making her aware of how long she had talked, how much of herself she had yielded up. She fell silent. His room, this flat, in this corner of the quiet close was the most beautiful, tranquil place she had ever been in, with an atmosphere like no other. Just to sit here, in the silence opposite him, made her tremble.
‘Goodness,’ she said now.
‘Thank you.’
‘What for?’
He smiled. ‘Telling me so much. People are not often so generous with themselves.’
It was a unique, extraordinary way of putting it. But he is unique, she thought, there can be no one else like him in the world.
‘I have to go.’
He neither tried to stop her nor leaped up, eager to see her out. He simply sat on, relaxed and still in the light of the lamp.
‘Thank you for this,’ Freya said. ‘I went to choir so that my mind would stop spinning the case round and round, and singing and then coming here really have given me what I needed.’
‘Rest and refreshment. It’s important to get as far away as possible from this sort of case … if not physically, then spiritually, mentally. It can drain you otherwise.’
Then he did get up and stroll across to the door with her. ‘I’ll come down,’ he said.
‘No, I’m fine.’
‘It is late, it is dark, there is no one about at this time and you are on your own.’
She laughed. ‘Simon, I’m a police officer.’
He put the flat door on the latch and looked at her, his handsome face stern. ‘And two women are missing.’
She looked at him for a long minute. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘I wish I was not thinking about them the way I am,’ Simon said, touching a hand to her back to guide her as she began to descend the stairs. The touch burned into her.
At her car, he held the driver’s door for her. She hesitated a fraction of a second. He did not move.
‘Thank you again.’
‘My pleasure. Goodnight, Freya.’
He lifted a hand and stood watching until she had driven down the close to the arch at the far end and away.
Twenty-Six
Mr Victor Freeborn disappeared from the Four Ways Nursing Home some time after four o’clock in the afternoon. No one had seen or heard him come downstairs and go out of the front door, which Mrs Murdo the secretary found unlatched when she slipped out to the postbox at five to five.
It was not until twenty past six that the police patrol car brought Mr Freeborn back, having found him sitting on a bench beside the river wearing nothing but pyjamas and slippers.
It had happened before, but because of Angela Randall’s disappearance, Carol Ashton was in a greater state of anxiety than usual and it took the whole house a long time to settle down, by which time a carpenter had fitted a new, and more complicated, lock and they had had a staff conference about how else to tackle what the housekeeper Pam Thornhill called ‘the Houdini problem’.
So it was after eight o’clock when Carol got home and picked up the Echo to read over a much needed gin.
The disappearance of Debbie Parker was the main front-page story. Her photograph, a fat girl giggling on an ice rink, was blown up to a dramatic size. Carol read the report quickly, looking for some mention of Angela Randall. There was none. Yet the two cases seemed to have plenty of similarities.
But if the links were so obvious, why was there no reference to Angela? What were the police doing? Had her case simply been filed away and forgotten? Carol recalled the young, pretty, efficient-seeming Detective Sergeant Graffham, who had certainly not given the impression that she would put her notes of their conversations in a drawer. She felt upset. Someone else was missing, Angela still was, and Carol thought she owed it to her colleague to remind the police of her name; she also felt angry, that she had reported something important and been sidelined.
She finished her gin and tonic, poured herself half an inch more, capped the bottle and went to the telephone.
‘I’m sorry, DS Graffham isn’t in,’ the voice answered. ‘Can anyone else help you?’
Carol hesitated. She didn’t want to have to tell the whole story from scratch to someone who knew nothing about it.
‘Can you tell me when she will be available?’
‘You could try tomorrow morning.’
‘Can I leave a message?’
She gave her name and number and asked for the sergeant to call her urgently.
But she won’t, she thought, going into the kitchen to start preparing herself something to eat. In her experience, people, however charming and well intentioned, seldom did ring you back. She started to beat two eggs for an omelette, but by the time she had got some salad things from the fridge, she was too restless to leave things until the next morning. She left the kitchen and went back to the phone.
‘Bevham and District Newspapers, good evening, how may I help you?’
A few minutes later, she was speaking to someone called Rachel Carr. Forty minutes later the same Rachel Carr was ringing her doorbell.
‘Mrs Ashton, tell me about this lady who you say is missing – Angela Randall. I gather she works for you?’
She did not scribble notes in a spiral-bound book, she had put a small recording machine on the coffee table between them. Carol watched the little chocolate-coloured spools go round as she talked, about herself and the Four Ways, about Angela, about her disappearance, about speaking to the police twice, and finally, about the shock of reading that another single woman had gone missing.
‘So of course I looked at the report expecting there to be something about Angela … well, it was obvious. Only there just wasn’t.’