The Convenience of Lies (4 page)

Six

Three
days before McCall chanced upon Lexie filming her cough and spit of an appearance in “Inspector Morse”, a press conference about Ruby’s disappearance was held sixty miles away at Manor Hill police station.

Her
mother made an emotional appeal for information. A twenty-second clip aired on regional BBC news that night. Lexie called in a favour from a props buyer in the drama department who wangled her a cassette of the uncut rushes from the film library. She’d brought it with her for McCall to see.

He
now inserted it into his machine and they sat back to watch. From the look of dread in her eyes, Etta could have been facing a firing squad, not a thinly attended presser.

She
walked uncertainly between a uniformed policewoman and a civilian press relations officer, almost as if she was in custody.

‘Hey,
that PR guy, that’s Malky Hoare,’ McCall said. ‘I know him from Fleet Street days. Wicked old sod, couldn’t even lie straight in bed.’

Hoare’s
amiable face seemed to overflow his tight blue collar. He was an alumnus of a minor fee-paying school which gave him a faux posh accent, a facility to recite lines of rote-learned poetry and a belief he was a wordsmith when under the influence.

Etta
looked trapped. McCall immediately thought this suspiciously like policing as opposed to theatre, testing how a suspect performed under media lights and questions.

Hoare
placed a photograph of Ruby on the desk in front of them and thanked the hacks for attending.

‘OK
gents, you’ve got my briefing. This is Mrs Etta Ross, the mother of the little girl who’s been missing for three days now and she wants to make a personal appeal through you to get Ruby home where she belongs.’

Etta
was attractive, not beautiful, small boned, late thirties and unlike her sister, had the fashion sense of an office temp - prim black skirt, white silky top, simple silver chain around her freckled neck.

The
cameraman tightened from a wide three-shot to a single. Etta’s reddened eyes had done more weeping than sleeping. Her hands shook as if the prepared statement was a warrant for her execution.

‘My
daughter is the world to me,’ she said.

Her
voice trembled but gave no hint of its origins.

‘I…
I just want her back… if you’re watching this, Ruby, you’re not in any trouble, darling, no one’s angry with you, honest they’re not.’

Whatever
composure she had summoned up began to slip. The policewoman put an arm around her as Etta tried again.

‘I…
just want you to come home or tell someone in the street who you are and ask them to find a police officer and then they’ll bring you home. I miss you so much, Ruby.

‘The
flat isn’t the same without you… and if anyone out there knows where she is, please, please let her go.’

Then
Etta pushed back her chair and ran out crying, hands over her face. The policewoman quickly followed. Hoare filled in by asking for questions. An uninterested local paper reporter wanted to know if Ruby had gone missing before.

‘No,
and this is why the police are so worried about her.’

‘Could
we be talking kidnap or murder?’

‘We’re
not speculating on either at the moment. This remains a missing child inquiry and we’re doing all we can to find her alive and well.’

‘Is
it true what the neighbours say, that this Ruby’s a bit of an oddball?’

‘Ruby
has some behavioural, psychological problems’ Hoare said. ‘She sometimes finds it difficult to interact with people.’

‘So
you’re saying she’s a nutter?’

At
this, a man in a pale cotton jacket and jeans emerged from behind the camera and propelled the hack towards the door. The camera mic picked up his parting words.

‘Listen,
sonny. Ruby’s a little kid in danger, so get on your bloody typewriter and help me find her.’

The
screen went blank. McCall turned to Lexie.

‘Good
for him - whoever he is.’

‘Believe
it or not, he’s the detective in charge,’ Lexie said.

‘You
mean you’ve met him?’

‘Yes,
with Etta when Ruby first went missing. He’s called Benwick.’

‘But
if he’s running the case, why didn’t he take the press conference?’

‘No
idea but when I talked to him, he wasn’t like any cop I’ve ever known, a real charmer like one of those American cops on television.’

McCall
would ring Hoare to line up an off-the-record briefing. Lexie could call Etta to arrange for him to meet her, too. He needed more examples of Ruby’s extraordinary drawings - and other photographs of her, too.

But
if McCall felt himself morphing into a hack again, it wasn’t only Ruby’s face which hovered between him and redemption.

*

From her bedroom window, Etta Ross could make out the silhouette of the reservoir’s dominating castle, top lit by a rising full moon. It was not cold but she shook. Someone was walking up and down on her grave.

Candles
shone behind the rocks of purple amethyst on her dressing table. Amethysts are said to promote clarity of thought but aid the passing of souls to the next world, too.

Her
mind was a turmoil of regret and remorse, made no easier by the detective who’d just left. His smile couldn’t hide the menace behind his eyes. Those pictures he showed her… men who didn’t know they were being photographed. She told him she’d not seen any of them before.

But
she was lying. Mr Ginger was all too familiar.

Etta
drew her heavy purple drapes to shut out the world beyond the window and to be alone in the place where only she had all the clues - and all the answers - for the truth was always in the tarot.

She
sat before her reflection in the mirror and shuffled the pack. The first card she turned was the High Priestess. Such irony. Of all the 22 major arcana cards, Etta most identified with this one - the mysterious keeper of supernatural knowledge, sitting between pillars of light and dark, life and death. Only the High Priestess knew what was hidden behind the curtain - and how to keep it secret.

But
any parallel with Etta ended there. Within the figure of the High Priestess was imprinted the legend of Persephone, abducted from a field of flowers and spirited into the underworld.

Persephone’s
mother searched the earth to rescue the daughter she loved. But not until the goddess of witchcraft finally guided her to look in the land of the dead did she find where she had been taken - and would have spent the rest of eternity.

Etta
threw all the cards on the floor. She lay face down on the scarlet covers of her empty bed, alone and in great distress.

There
was no magic which might undo what she herself had brought about, no tears could wash away her wickedness, no deity help her through what lay ahead.

Seven

Everything
about Detective Inspector Larry Benwick intrigued Hoare and stirred his tabloid curiosity. He was more Miami Vice than Inspector Morse, not yet forty and with an assured but anonymous face and fair hair long overdue a cut. Benwick could have been anyone but a hardly regular cop.

Hoare
asked around the press office about him. Someone thought he’d recently returned from an overseas posting and had been parachuted into Manor Hill for the Ruby Ross job.

He
managed to get a better steer from an anti terrorist contact in specialist operations. They’d met for a gargle in The Albert on Victoria Street where Scotland Yard’s officer class went range finding on each other’s weaknesses.

‘So,
you gouty old reprobate, still glad you quit poaching to become a gamekeeper?’

‘Force
majeur,’ Hoare said. ‘Fleet Street’s a young man’s game.’

‘But
you always lied about your age.’

‘Till
I dyed my hair grey and fell foul of the young Turks.’

‘Well,
at least you’ve gone respectable now.’

‘Again,
no choice. My ex and her lawyers need their pound of flesh.’

‘And
you’ve a cross to bear?’

‘Too
right. My bloody shoulder’s full of splinters.’

They
sat in a corner alcove, well into a bottle of Merlot. Hoare lit a cigarette from the butt of another. He’d washed up in a hack’s last refuge - public relations - but hadn’t lost habits like trousering other people’s receipts for his own exes.

His
companion checked his watch. He was running a live operation to find - and if necessary, kill - a Provisional IRA active service unit intent on turning the London Stock Exchange into a car park. Hoare took the hint.

‘Look,
I’m doing the words on a missing kid case for a DI called Larry Benwick and I’m trying to find out a bit more about him.’

‘Why
would you want to do that?’

‘Because
he’s a bit of a mystery. I’d like my card marked now I’m working with him.’

His
source finished his drink then offered some parting words of advice.

‘I’ve
heard tell that some blokes in our game go off the books for years.’

‘Really?
Is that where Benwick’s been - off the books?’

‘Do
yourself a favour, matey. It’s often safest to hear nothing, see nothing and say a damn sight less. Do you get my meaning?’

So
now he waited for Benwick in the communal yard behind the shabby, low-rise block of council flats where Ruby lived. Hoare knew two questions niggled Benwick when he’d read into Ruby’s case file – why didn’t Etta ring 999 immediately she realised her daughter was missing and why was she reluctant to say what she herself was doing that Friday afternoon? He’d not believed her story about being in bed with a migraine and drowsy from painkillers.

Murder
was usually a family affair so she was brought in. They’d sweat Etta in an interview room as a witness, under suspicion but not arrest.

While
that was going on, Benwick wanted to conduct a second search of the flat but with his PR man present.

‘Forensics
tell me the kid’s body isn’t there,’ he’d said. ‘But it’s coming time for you to be let in on a few secrets.’

*

Linden House was once a Utopian design for living to replace many acres of diseased Victorian slums. But the complex of maisonettes had itself now become a warehouse for the socially disadvantaged, those from many nations whose refugee tongues could be heard in dark stairwells running with the piss of drunks and dogs.

Here
were watchful eyes, briefly glimpsed behind rainbow veils before a door closed or a window shut. But they could tell of torture and of those they had loved who’d disappeared into the night, never to be seen again.

Some
flats were boarded up - squats where heroin and crack cocaine were dealt to the walking dead who drifted by Hoare, barely making a shadow.

From
this place and from such people, police needed help. A child cannot vanish without someone seeing, someone knowing.

Hoare
had struggled to generate much media interest in Ruby. The papers were preoccupied with the Gulf War, Britain’s military role in it and oil prices rising. If Benwick expected more coverage, he was on a loser - unless they found a corpse.

A
silver Vauxhall Cavalier drew into the yard. Benwick emerged in his Florida cop outfit and nodded for Hoare to follow him to Etta’s ground floor flat. He unlocked the door and they stepped straight into the kitchen.

‘No
offence, but let me give you the gypsy’s warning,’ Benwick said. ‘If anything you’re about to see gets leaked back to your old pals in Fleet Street before I’m ready,
I
shall be at the psychotic end of really hacked off. We understand each other, yes?’

Behind
Benwick’s smile, his unblinking eyes remained fixed on Hoare in the same impersonal manner of a gangland enforcer he’d interviewed in a previous life.

‘Anyway,
notice how clean it all is, Mr Hoare… no blood and guts for us to find.’

Every
surface gleamed – the aluminium sink and drainer, a Formica-topped table, the black and white linoleum under their feet. The bathroom and toilet were the same, shining, relieved of all germs and contamination.

Ruby’s
bedroom was equally dirt-free. Coloured pens and crayons and an unused pad of A3 cartridge paper were neatly laid out on a small table by her pine-framed bed. On the wall above was an architecturally detailed pencil drawing of the castle-like Victorian pumping station at Manor Hill reservoir.