Troubled Waters (13 page)

‘Why was he agitated about Miranda?’

‘No idea. I did ask but . . . he wasn’t for telling. Just clammed up. I expect that they’d fallen out over something, not yet made it up. He was certainly cross about something. You’ll need to ask him.’

As he was speaking, he was busily leafing through another of the blue files, licking his finger every so often for maximum speed. The sound of a horn hooting a couple of times made him look up again momentarily, hissing ‘Shit!’ through his teeth as he did so.

‘He didn’t show up at his work,’ DC Cairns said, ‘we checked it out yesterday.’

‘That’s my taxi. Maybe he’s not well or something.’

‘Maybe. He wasn’t at home though,’ Alice said.

‘He’s a young man! Staying with a friend? Being looked after by a friend? Perhaps, God forbid, taking a sickie?’ Evans replied, closing the file and tucking it under his arm. Below his raffish, pencil-thin moustache, a relieved smile was taking shape. It transformed his features, making it almost impossible not to like him. Members of the jury often fell under its spell, particularly the older female ones. Addressing them, in full flight, he resembled a diminutive Italian tenor striding about the stage, gesticulating excitedly, quite carried away by his own performance. The beauty of his voice, whatever gruel-thin
defence he was peddling, guaranteed him a good hearing. Listening to it, one of them had once remarked, was like having warm chocolate poured in your ear.

‘He’s not answering his phone,’ Alice persevered.

‘Switched off? Broken? Run out of money? Lost it? Look, I don’t know. I’m sorry not to be more help, I really am . . . but I’m rushing. You can see I’m rushing. I’m supposed to be seeing a client for a plea,’ he looked at his watch, ‘. . . ten minutes ago. You lot know what it’s like, what appearing in court’s like. He’s a big boy, my son, I don’t worry about him any more. Now, forgive me, ladies, but I must be off!’

As they were walking across the road to their car, Christopher Evans’ black cab sped past them on its way to the Sheriff Court in Chambers Street. Catching sight of them, he waved cheerily.

‘Why didn’t you mention Miranda Stimms’ death to him?’ DC Cairns asked. She jinked suddenly off the pavement to avoid a woman pushing an old man in a wheelchair, the lead of a poodle attached to it stretched taut, ready to trip up the unwary.

‘Because,’ Alice paused, ‘because . . . oh, I don’t know. It’s been in the papers by now. I didn’t feel I had to tell him. He might not even have known her, personally, I mean. Hamish Evans is only a suspect. And that’s as much as anything else because we can’t find him. And, I suppose, because he was her boyfriend. We need to eliminate him as a suspect. To do that we need Evans Senior’s full co-operation. It’s always a fine balance, what to say, what not to say. I didn’t want him immediately phoning the boy, tipping him off. Not if he did it.’

At informal meetings held in St John’s House, Ailsa Whyte had decreed that biscuits were allowed, and chocolate ones at that. Cake, however, would be a step too far. Before the others had even arrived in the designated meeting room of the social work department, she had helped herself to one, a ‘Rocky’, and she was considering whether to have seconds, this time in the form of a triangle of shortbread. Her social work colleague, Eileen Polson, wandered in, looking red-nosed and even more glaikit than usual, Ailsa thought. With the beginnings of a cold, from her appearance, or something worse, flu or pneumonia even. She was carrying the tray with the teapot, hot water and coffee flask on it, and seemed to be struggling under the weight. These skinny types had no reserves, Mrs Whyte decided, no proper immunity, and when they were infected, as she plainly was, they dwindled away to nothing, took weeks to recover. And why in the name of the little green man did they come to work in such a state, jam-packed with viruses? Did they imagine that they were irreplaceable or something? The selfishness of it took your breath away.

‘Are you alright?’ Ailsa asked, in a concerned tone, smiling kindly at her colleague, and hoping that she would not take a seat anywhere close by.

‘Soldiering on,’ Ms Polson replied, through her blocked sinuses, setting down her burden with a clunk and opting for the chair beside Doug Brunton, the bearded police sergeant from Gayfield. He took one look at her and then shuffled his chair sideways, as if to afford her extra room. Frank Tyler, the school psychologist, glanced up at her, settling on little more than a wave of his pen by way of greeting. Unbeknown to her, it was no longer a pen but a baton gripped between his long fingers, his mind busy
elsewhere, conducting the introduction to ‘Zadok the Priest’.

‘Well, let’s get going,’ Ailsa Whyte said, looking round the table at the five seated there, deliberately including and involving them before continuing. ‘We’re here, as you all know, to discuss Susie’s progress, since she was found in Madeira Street four days ago. Susie’s given name is currently unknown to us as she does not speak, for whatever reason. Now, has anyone got anything to share?’

A seemingly endless thirty seconds passed without anybody volunteering a comment. A look of pained disappointment now crossed Mrs Whyte’s features as she exercised her right as chair to extract contributions from the others.

‘Frank,’ she said brightly, gazing at him as if he might have something momentous to impart, ‘why don’t you kick off for us. You’ve met Susie, haven’t you? What’s your thinking at this moment in time?’ With his cloud of auburn hair and long, aquiline nose, he had the looks, she had long ago decided, of a pre-Raphaelite angel.

‘Well,’ he began, laying down his pen and dragging himself away from the, as yet incomplete, organ solo playing in his mind, ‘I have seen her, yes, but only for five minutes, to see if we’d be a suitable school for her. I’ll need to do a proper assessment. At the moment, I don’t know what’s wrong with her. Plainly, she has communication issues, but I’m sure she understands a certain amount. Karen, our speech therapist, has been seeing her and she’s quite optimistic, all in all. I’ll need to draw up a Co-ordinated Support Plan if she’s staying with us, unless you’re going to see to that, Laura?’

‘Laura?’ Mrs Whyte interjected unnecessarily, swatting an impertinent fly away from her mouth.

‘No problem, I’ll attend to that,’ the head teacher replied, raising her eyes for a second from her tablet and watching, entranced, as the fly redoubled its efforts to land on the senior social worker’s lips.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ Ailsa Whyte said, shaking her head. ‘Are we not getting ahead of ourselves? We don’t even know where she’s from yet. Can we open a support plan?’

‘Right enough, Ailsa, good thinking. No, we can’t. Anyway, she probably has one somewhere already. So, other than fixing up the assessment, I’m not sure there’s anything else much I can add at this juncture, to be honest,’ the man said. And as if his contribution was complete, he tucked his pen into the breast pocket of his plaid shirt.

‘Any developments in trying to find out who she is?’ Mrs Whyte demanded, ignoring his silent, but eloquent withdrawal, her arms now flailing around her face in her attempt to ward off the bluebottle.

‘No. I’ve e-mailed all the schools to see if they have any absentees matching her description, but half of them haven’t got back to me yet. If that doesn’t work I’m going to try the private schools.’

‘Fine. Good. Excellent,’ Mrs Whyte replied, at last managing to squash her tormentor with a corner of her file, and favouring the psychologist with one of her rare smiles. ‘That leads us nicely back to you, Laura . . .’

‘Susie, as I believe we’ve all agreed to call her,’ the head teacher began, glancing round at the group as if seeking their assent again, ‘is settling in quite nicely. She’s not said anything yet, or used any of Karen’s boards or anything, but we’re quite happy with her progress, all things considered. As we don’t know her age we’ve put her in, at present, with the S 4’s, but that may be subject
to review. At the moment we’re concentrating on one-to-one work. We’ve only had one episode of challenging behaviour when she pushed somebody against a wall. She didn’t hurt them, but she might have done. We have only one issue with her – she won’t eat. We’ve tried everything we can but, to be honest, we’ve failed.’

‘OK, thank you for that, Laura. Now, Jane?’ Ailsa Whyte said, nodding at the woman next to her, an emergency foster parent, to coax her into speaking. Eventually, in the ensuing silence, she had to repeat her invitation to speak: ‘Jane?’

In response to the forceful prompt, Jane Caterall, a large woman with both arms crossed over her massive bosom, looked up and began to talk in a low, gravelly rumble. ‘It’s early days, obviously, but she’s getting on alright with us at home. Knows her way about, she’ll sit with Bill ’n’ me and watch the TV and that. Loves the TV, particularly the cartoons. She’s sleeping fine, too fine, almost. It takes a deal to get her up in the morning. But she’ll not eat. We’ve tried everything, vegetarian, pizzas, I’ve even made soups, but she’ll take almost nothing. She cries a lot. I’m worried about her.’

‘Have you got her to say anything, to communicate with either of you in any meaningful way?’ Ailsa Whyte asked, watching out of the side of her eye as her sickly subordinate picked up a piece of shortbread with her germ-covered fingers, then replaced it. She made a mental note to steer clear of the shortbread. In fact, it should be in the bin with the lot, the second the meeting was over.

‘No. I mean she’ll point and that, if she wants something. Or, sometimes, just sometimes, mind, she’ll grunt, sort of moan. I don’t know if she can speak. Her understanding seems OK, that’s not really a problem. I let her
play on the computer after tea sometimes, to cheer her up, she likes that fine. Games and everything, she’d play them all night. Loves her games. TV, too, she watches everything with a big smile on her face.’

‘Sergeant Brunton, any progress at your end of things?’

The policeman stopped doodling toadstools on his papers. Taking his time, he returned the sheets to their proper sequence. When finally he spoke, everyone was listening hard, expecting him to have something significant to contribute.

‘No,’ fraid not. There have been no missing person reports, which I would not have believed. I suppose her parents may not speak English or something, but you’d think, wouldn’t you, that someone would be looking for her – for a child. You’d expect someone to get in touch. The descriptions we’ve given out in the press and so on haven’t worked. Nor have the door-to-doors which we carried out. No one’s come about the posters either. Honestly, you’d think that she’d fallen off the moon.’

‘Very good,’ Mrs Whyte said, adding, ‘you’ll let us know if there are any developments?’

‘Of course,’ he replied huffily, annoyed that she thought he needed to be asked.

‘Laura,’ she said, pausing theatrically to allow Ms Polson to sneeze, ‘I should have asked, are we at the stage of speaking to the school doctor? About Susie’s eating, I mean?’

‘To be honest, I did think about it. She’s such a skinny wee thing, there’s nothing of her . . . she’s all wrists and legs. I’m worried about anorexia. She’ll get weak Maybe she should go to one of the specialist units?’

‘Is she drinking?’

‘She is, yes.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Mrs Whyte said, collecting the tea cups and letting everyone know that the meeting was over, ‘but we must be careful. She’s bound to be unhappy, confused, depressed even. She’ll likely be missing her home, her parents, her siblings. Her refusal may stem from all the changes she’s undergone. Possibly, by refusing to eat she’s regaining control over the situation – in her own mind, to her own satisfaction. If we refer her elsewhere, say, to a specialist unit in another region, it may compound the problem, lengthen it. It would be worse yet, if she had to go to another school as well.’

‘I’ll speak to Dr Leven at the school, see what he says. His input should keep us right, eh?’ Ms Polson murmured, rising from her chair and dabbing her nose with a damp paper hankie.

‘I need to put down a marker,’ Jane Caterall said, sounding anxious, but truculent. ‘I’m worried, really worried about her. Bill ’n’ me have no experience of this; I’ve had no training for this. It’ll all need to be properly minuted, my concerns and everything.’

‘Leave it with me, Janey,’ Ailsa Whyte replied, her hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘And don’t you concern yourself – if a move has to be made, we’ll make it. You’ll only have her for a couple more days, max, until we find a more permanent placement. Anyway, if need be, to my certain knowledge there’s an excellent specialist unit in Aberdeen, but, in the meanwhile, let’s give it just a few more days, eh. Hopefully she’ll settle down and start eating.’

‘See if she’ll eat if you leave her on her own,’ Frank Tyler chipped in. ‘Maybe it’s people watching her she doesn’t like – that’s not unknown.’

‘Bill ’n’ me aren’t “people”,’ Jane Caterall replied, affronted.

‘No?’ he answered, baffled by her response.

‘Or, better still, Sergeant Brunton will finally find her parents, and discover for us what’s been going on,’ Mrs Whyte said smoothly, determined to defuse the situation, avoid any unnecessary misunderstandings.