Murdering Ministers (9 page)

“No. Why?”

Oliver scratched his head. “I'd have thought Sam and Joan would have called in spiritual reinforcements in this time of trial.”

“Once they accepted that Tina had run away, they were adamant that they wanted to keep it in the family. Sam insisted that we didn't do a local house-to-house because of what the neighbors might think. I told them that once we started making our inquiries at Tina's school, it wouldn't be a secret much longer.” She shrugged. “So there's nothing else I should know about the United Diaconalist Church? No human sacrifices or ritual cannibalism?”

Oliver smiled. “That might have made last Sunday evening a bit more interesting.”

“You'd probably find any church service dull.”

“Not at all,” he protested. “I used to love going to evensong in my parents' village, all Stanford and stained glass. Especially on a snowy winter evening, with a brisk trot home through the moonlight afterwards, and the promise of mulled wine and warm flannel sheets. And I can vividly recall a summer evening on the promenade in Folkestone, listening to a Salvation Army brass band play ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea' in the gathering twilight, with the waves breaking endlessly on the shore behind them. A magical moment.”

“Oh, Oliver,” Effie sighed, brushing his fringe aside with her fingertips, “you're really quite spiritual. If you only worked out, you'd be perfect.”

He ignored the sly joke about his thin body, since he knew she equated muscularity with male narcissism. But religion had never come up before. It would be depressing, at this stage, to find out she was a Moonie. “So do I take it you're not much of a believer yourself?” he asked her casually.

Effie frowned. “That's rather a deep question for this stage of our relationship,” she answered coldly. “Are you already planning our children's religious education?”

“Good heavens, no,” he stammered, aware that his face must be reddening. “Nothing could be further from my thoughts. Well, not further, just not yet. I mean it's all too soon isn't it? Or don't you think it's too soon? Not that there's anything wrong in thinking about those things, and as far as that goes, I'd love to have your children, Effie. Sorry, I mean I'd love to get you pregnant. No I don't. Well, I do, but not without your knowing. Of course, you'd know eventually, but I was hoping we could practice a few more times first.”

He broke off, convinced that he could say nothing further to extricate himself, and wilted under Effie's icy stare. Suddenly, she let out in a peal of laughter.

“Oh, Ollie, you're so easy sometimes,” she chuckled. “This
is
going to be fun.”

The lights in the hall flashed, and the playgoers started to wander back to their seats. There seemed to be more of them, as if word of Mallard's popularity had spread around the village during the interval.

“There is one thing I've remembered,” Oliver whispered as the play began. “Tina's a thin thing, but she was complaining about gaining weight and feeling nauseous.”

“So?”

“Well, I was wondering if she had the beginnings of some kind of adolescent eating disorder. Bulimia or anorexia nervosa. Maybe that's how her frustrations with her parents are emerging?”

The reappearance of the actors ended the conversation. They settled back to watch the second half of the play.

Once again, Mallard's performance was the triumph of the production. His Nick Bottom, portrayed as a pretentious director wannabe, more than compensated for the disturbing concept of the fairy world as a bunch of pre-war Nazi sympathizers and the antics of the cross-dressing Victorian male lovers. The problem with four naked middle-aged men leaping gracefully into an orchestra pit was that they had to clamber back onto the stage afterwards, which they accomplished with considerably less elegance. “I've just remembered, we have to buy some Christmas tree ornaments,” Effie murmured idly. Oliver preferred not to watch.

The audience brightened as the “Pyramus and Thisbe” play-within-a-play approached, and erupted into spontaneous applause when the Athenians strutted out for the dumb show, dressed in RSC hand-me-downs. They assumed Mallard's discomfort in the skin-tight leather breeches was part of the act, and this comical counterpoint meant that his perfectly straight, almost moving delivery of Pyramus' ludicrous lines, as well as his exasperated asides to the heckling noblemen, continued to evoke gales of laughter. Finally, the moment came for Mallard as Bottom as Pyramus to stab himself with his sword. The deed done, Mallard stood facing the audience and an expectant hush fell throughout the theater. He let the weapon slip noisily from his hand.

“Now am I dead,” he stated hoarsely. “Now am I fled. My soul is in the sky.”

He tried to lift a hand to gesture toward heaven, but the weight of encroaching death was too much, and his arm dropped abruptly. The playgoers watched, enthralled.

“Tongue, lose thy light. Moon take thy flight.”

This was the cue for the actor portraying Moonshine to reverse off the platform with a much-rehearsed silly walk, but nobody noticed. All eyes were on Mallard.

“Now die,” he whispered, his head drooping almost imperceptibly. “Die,” he breathed again. His knees began to buckle, and he let the momentum turn his body until he was facing upstage. He cried “die” twice more, once quizzically and then as if all the answers to the human condition had flooded into his wasting mind in the intervening microseconds. He collapsed onto his knees, still with his back to the audience, who by now were holding their breaths.

With a final “die” that was no more than the last intake of air leaving a tortured body, Mallard fell forward onto his outstretched arms, about to subside into a lifeless heap.

And then, releasing a small puff of talcum powder, the seat of his trousers split open.

“Well, Ollie,” Effie shouted, barely audible over the cheers and rapturous ovation of a delighted audience, “now you really
can
say you've seen it.”

Chapter Four

With the Poor and Mean and Lowly

Saturday, December 20

Tish Belfry was already at her desk when Effie arrived at the Plumley OCU on Saturday morning.

“Did Tina turn up?” Effie asked immediately.

Tish shook her head. “I called in on the Quarterboys on the way here,” she reported glumly. “They haven't heard a thing. I hate this part of the job. I only had to appear on the doorstop to create a disturbance. Mr. Q thought I had the girl in the car, so he was pissed off at me, Mrs. Q was convinced I was there to tell them she'd been fished out of the river, so she was relieved.”

“A fifty percent success rate, anyway,” said Effie, hanging up her heavy wool coat and ripping down the mistletoe that somebody had taped above the CID room's coat-stand. “Do you really hate your job?”

Tish sighed. “No, I love police work. But it seems we women always get stuck with the soft stuff. Missing children, battered wives.”

“Those are pretty important cases.”

“Oh, I know, I know, Sarge. That's the point. The men
don't
think they're important, which is why they fob them off on us. They only want to work on incidents that give them a chance to show how tough they are.”

“Call me Effie. Okay, let's remind ourselves of what we know.”

Tish checked a page of notes, neatly written out in her small handwriting. “Tina went to school as usual on Thursday. She left at about four o'clock, but didn't get home till nearly six. Her mother doesn't know where she was during these two hours, but she wasn't unduly worried because Tina takes part in after-school activities one or two nights a week, and Mrs. Q assumed this was one of those nights.”

“Were there any activities at the school?”

“Only the regular meeting of the computer club. Tina's not a member and she wasn't there.”

“How about irregular activities? Any pre-Christmas sporting events? Carol singing?”

“Nothing.”

“And we know Tina didn't hang out with her friends during that time. All the girls I spoke to said she left as soon as school ended and they hadn't seen her since. I couldn't find anyone who could think of a reason why she should run away.”

“Me neither. Although one of the girls I interviewed said she seemed withdrawn, thoughtful. Apparently she's usually something of a chatterbox. A bit full of herself.”

“She's not quite fourteen,” Effie mused. “Give her a year and she'll find herself taking a back pew to the boys in her class. Any boys in her life, by the way?”

“When I asked if she could have been meeting a boy after school, her friends seemed to think it was rather ludicrous. Tina spent a lot of time at this funny church her parents go to, and she came in for ribbing from her less religious peers.”

“Was there anything happening at the church that evening?”

“I doubt it. The Quarterboys would have known, wouldn't they? Isn't he some kind of bigwig?”

“Church secretary, if I remember rightly,” Effie said thoughtfully. Oliver had been out at Plumley during Tina's missing hours, or somewhat later. Had he said anything about meetings or events?

“Okay, so Tina arrives home at six,” she picked up, remembering her own interview with the Quarterboys the previous day. “She claims to be feeling unwell, doesn't want any tea, and takes herself off to her bedroom. Mr. Q gets home at seven, looks in on her and has a few brief words. He notices that she's writing and assumes she's now doing her homework, so he leaves her alone. At nine-thirty, she calls downstairs to say she's going to bed. Mother looks in on her at ten-thirty and she seems to be asleep. Next morning, the bird has flown, leaving only a note. When she doesn't appear at school, Mum and Dad call the cops demanding bloodhounds and search parties. Let's see that note again.”

Tish passed over a sheet of paper torn from a school exercise book, which Tina had left on the kitchen table. On it, she had written:

Dear Mum

Don't worry about me. I'll be alright.

I just don't want to disapoint Dad.

Please don't worry.

Love

Tina

“I wonder what would disappoint Dad?” Tish asked. “Sam and Joan said they had no idea what she meant.”

“From what I hear, Mr. Q. has high standards and expects her to run her life by them. A sneaky ciggie or a glimpse of
Playgirl
may be enough to plague her conscience for a fortnight.”

“Still, to run away…”

Tish broke off, looking apprehensively at the door to the large room. Casanova, better known as Detective Constable Trevor Stoodby had sidled through and was trying to shed his oversized parka without letting go of a large paper bag.

“Oh, good morning, Ma'am,” he said humbly to Effie.

Her first reaction was to correct the honorific, since it belonged to an officer with a higher rank—preferably female. Her second reaction was to let it stand. Stoodby hung up his parka, and then approached the women, pulling various paper cups, packets, and stirrers from the bag.

“I thought you might like some nice hot coffee, Ma'am,” he whispered, “seeing that it's a bit nippy out. I brought you some too, Tish. Black, one sugar, right?”

He smiled at Tish hopefully, who snatched away Tina's note before he could put her coffee cup on it.

“White, no sugar,” she said scornfully. “But there's no reason why you'd know that.” Stoodby looked downcast.

“Well, I didn't put the sugar in,” he said contritely, “and there's milk in those little cartons. But I'll try to remember in future.” He turned away and drifted toward his desk, muttering “White, no sugar” several times under his breath.

“Trevor,” Effie called. He spun around, delight and apprehension fighting for the right to contort his features.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Yeah, thanks Trev,” Tish added reluctantly. In the battle for Stoodby's face, relief elbowed delight and apprehension aside and won by a nose.

“Where do you think Tina was during those missing hours?” Effie asked Tish.

“Maybe she was wandering around, afraid to go home? We could walk the route from school to home, ask people on the street if they saw her. It's largely residential in those areas, a couple of parks, although they wouldn't be too crowded in this cold weather.”

“Shops? Chip shop? Some place to play video games?”

“Not where she lives, it's the posher part of town. She'd have to go well out of her way to reach the shops where the kids like to hang out.”

“She had two hours. Maybe she was up the High Street, buying some Christmas prezzies for Mum and Dad? Let's try some street interviews this afternoon.”

“It's a shame today's Saturday, though—there won't be the same traffic patterns as there would be on a weekday.”

Saturday, thought Effie. She had planned to spend the day with Oliver. “Try it anyway,” she said. “And look out for dog-walkers.”

“Dog-walkers?”

“They often keep to a regular pattern. A dog's digestive system doesn't know it's the weekend. Don't focus just on Thursday evening—she may have been seen in the area since then. Tina doesn't seem a particularly worldly child, and I have a hunch that she won't have gone too far. My guess is she could be staying with someone. A friend, a relative, perhaps a sympathetic adult, who's letting her calm down before sending her home again.” Effie thought for a second. “How was her health?”

“Okay as far as we know. It sounds as if she was only pretending to be sick when she came home as an excuse to stay in her room, out of the way of her parents.”

“I'd still like to know if she's been ill recently. Particularly if she's been showing any signs of an eating disorder. After all, she completely avoided her tea that evening.”

“Another hunch?”

“A little piece of inside information. I have my sources.”

“How mysterious!” exclaimed Tish. “But all right, I'll track down her doctor. Let's hope he or she is cooperative and not all fluffed up about patient privacy.”

“The girl's underage and missing. Make that clear if you get any resistance. Okay, you call the Quarterboys, get the name of the doctor, and follow up there. Warn them that I'm coming over this morning. Then get more copies of Tina's photograph and line up some plods for street interviews this afternoon. I wonder if uniform have come up with anything, based on the circulation of her description?”

“They haven't,” said Stoodby sorrowfully. He glanced up, seemingly surprised that the women were looking at him. “I checked on the way in. I didn't mention it sooner, because I didn't want to interrupt you.”

“Well, thank you, Trevor.”

“Don't mention it,” he said, almost flushing. “Say, Tish, put me down for the street interviews this afternoon.”

“Don't you have other cases to be working on?” Tish asked acidly.

“Oh yes, but this seems rather more important,” Stoodby said, brimming with earnestness. “I hate to think of that poor little girl being away from her mum and dad, what with the cold weather and Christmas coming. I'll ask Mr. Welkin if I can lend a hand.”

Tish stared at him. Effie was more circumspect.

“You've got enough to keep you busy?” she asked Tish.

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Me? I'm going to make a phone call. Then I'm going to drop in on the Quarterboys. And then I'm going to church.”

***

Geoffrey Angelwine woke with the cloying taste of chloroform still in his nose and mouth. His immediate reaction was amazement, first at finding himself alive and then at finding himself upright after so many hours of unconsciousness. But he quickly realized that his position was secured by manacles and chains that pinned him to the wall behind him.

Geoffrey opened his eyes, to little purpose. There was no light. Was it a room? It was cold, and he sensed the air moving on his face, as if some unseen ice giant were breathing on him in the darkness. As he tentatively moved his hands across the surface of the wall, it seemed uneven and strangely sticky.

He had been in bed, that he remembered, thinking with a quiet satisfaction of the several practical jokes he had played on Oliver during the day—the depilatory in the shampoo had been particularly effective—when the noises began. Scratching, rustling, and a high-pitched breathiness, like suppressed squeaking, coming from under his bed. He was leaning over, lifting the edge of the counterpane, when something—no, several things, furry, with short arms and sour breath—had shot out, pressed the wet handkerchief over his face, and held it there.

He tried to move his arms, but the manacles were tight and strong. If only he could see. But wait—there was a light! In the distance, a flicker of flame, coming toward him along a long, rocky passageway. And two strange pink dots, glowing above it. They were like eyes, but he knew nothing or nobody that had pink eyes, apart from a rabbit maybe or a…

A cold sensation gripped his heart and caused him to sweat from every available pore. He started to quake, rattling the chains around his body. Geoffrey knew this wasn't fear. He had experienced fear before, and this new feeling was far, far worse. There was only one word that Geoffrey could squeeze through his trembling lips, and that was…“Finsbury!”

The ferret stopped and smiled. “The same,” he drawled, lifting the candle high and forcing the shadows to shrink like rapidly drying stains around the cave walls. “Welcome to my guest room.”

“Oh my God,” cried Geoffrey, struggling with the iron chains, “somebody help me! Help!”

Finsbury stroked his whiskers fastidiously with the back of a paw, and placed the candlestick on an old packing case, the cave's only furniture.

“Shout all you like,” he crooned. “That shmuck little Billy and all his ghastly family can't hear you down here.”

He produced a turd-sized cigar from his velvet dressing gown and lit it in the candle's flame, taking a few leisurely puffs.

“What do you want with me?” Geoffrey stammered.

“Want?” the ferret echoed, with mock astonishment. “Isn't it obvious? I want you to suffer, as all practical jokers should suffer.” He blew a mouthful of foul-smelling smoke into Geoffrey's face. “I hate practical jokers, Angelwine. I believe that every idiot who spends the morning on April the First telling his trusting friends that their flies are open and collapsing into helpless laughter, simply because they look, should be drowned in a dribble glass and buried in a coffin filled with whoopee cushions.”

“But I was only doing it for the book,” Geoffrey whined.

Finsbury smirked and stepped back. He perched himself on the packing case, crossing his legs and letting a Turkish slipper dangle from his elevated paw. He sucked contentedly on the stogie.

“What are you going to do me?” Geoffrey quavered, after several seconds of unbearable silence. He was unable to break his gaze from those porcine-pink eyes. “What fiendish yet strangely apt tortures do you have planned, you weasel from Hell? Is it the joy-buzzer that's hooked up to 40 million volts? The fake buttonhole that squirts sulphuric acid? The gun that's really a cigarette lighter that turns out to be a gun after all? What? For God's sake, tell me!”

“How unsubtle,” sighed Finsbury with a languorous yawn. “No, I have something special planned for you, Mr. Angelwine. I'm going to sit here…and abuse the English language!”

Geoffrey frowned. “What? Nothing more insidiously painful? Excruciatingly agonizing? Diabolically though somehow deliciously evil?” He looked puzzled. “Frankly, Finsbury, I expected something more beastly than that.”

Finsbury shrugged. “None of us are perfect,” he said casually.

“Is,” Geoffrey muttered.