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‘Father Blake, this is Inspector Cicero, he calls himself, come to see me, I don’t know why. Now there’s no need for you to go with your tea still hot.’
The priest had risen with an expression of alarm. He was a tallish man in early middle age, his beard beginning to be flecked with grey. He looked at Dog anxiously through heavy horn-rimmed glasses and said in a low, unaccented voice, ‘I hope there’s no bad news, officer.’
‘Just some help with an enquiry,’ said Dog vaguely, not wanting to encourage a disruptive third party to witness his interview with the woman.
‘Fine,’ said the priest. ‘In that case, I will be running along. Thanks for the tea, Mrs Maguire. I’ll call again soon. I’ll see myself out.’
He gabbled a blessing and made for the door.
Dog said, ‘Oh, Father, is that your car outside? I may have blocked you in. Better have a look.’
He followed the priest into the hallway and at the front door he said in a low voice, ‘Look, there is some news, potentially bad. I need to talk to her alone but if you could come back in twenty minutes, say?’
Father Blake said, ‘Could you give me some idea … I’m not her parish priest you see, more a friend of the family.’
‘You’ll know her daughter then?’
‘Jane? No. I’ve never met her but naturally we’ve talked about her. Why? Is there something wrong? There hasn’t been an accident?’
His voice had risen and Dog glanced warningly towards the sitting room door.
‘Nothing like that,’ said Dog. ‘I’m sure Mrs Maguire will tell you all about it. Twenty minutes?’
He didn’t give Blake time to reply but urged him out of the front door and closed it behind him. Then he returned to the sitting room where Mrs Maguire was sitting by the empty fireplace. She motioned him to the chair Father Blake had occupied, which proved as hard as Dog had suspected.
‘Sorry to chase the Father away,’ he said. ‘He’s not your parish priest?’
‘No. He’d not be coming to my house in a suit if he was at St Mary’s, I tell you,’ she said scornfully. ‘He’s from the Priory College, if it’s any business of yours. A friend of my brother Patrick’s, God rest his soul.’
She glanced at a photo on the mantelpiece of a man in a soutane standing in front of a gloomy Gothic pile. It was her pride in having had a priest in the family which had made her uncharacteristically forthcoming, Dog guessed. Now, as if in reaction, she snapped, ‘What have you done with your face?’
The question took him by surprise. He was used to the curious side-glance or the carefully averted gaze, but direct questioning was a rarity.
‘A car accident,’ he said dismissively.
‘Oh yes. The drink was it?’ she said.
‘Yes. The drink played a part,’ he said softly.
Sitting in the bar, wanting another, hardly able to rise and go for it. The barman setting a pint of Guinness and a chaser before him. ‘Compliments.’ Nodding across the room to where a man stands, face beneath his old tweed hat unmemorable enough to be a forgotten acquaintance. A faint smile, a glass half raised, then the unmemorable blocked out by the unforgettable, a woman, her face candle-pale with emotion, her hair a flame that never burnt on any mere candle. ‘What the hell are you doing here, Dog? After what happened you must be mad! Let’s get you home.’
‘Men,’ said Mrs Maguire contemptuously. ‘If it’s not the fancy women, it’s the booze.’
Coming out of the bar, his arm across her shoulders. Light and the sound of laughter behind them; ahead, darkness and a rising wind with a caress of soft Irish rain. Her face turned up to his as he staggered on the uneven surface of the car park. ‘Darling, are you all right for the driving?’ His own voice slurred and angry. ‘Why not? No one asks me if I’m all right for the killing, do they?’
‘You’re so right, Mrs Maguire,’ he said. ‘It’s usually one or the other.’
She looked at him sharply, suspicious of irony. Then, surprised at detecting none, she folded her arms and said, ‘All right, Mr Cicero, what’s your business with me?’
He brought himself back to the present and said, ‘It’s about your daughter.’
‘Has there been an accident?’ she asked in alarm. He examined the alarm, found it genuine. Why not? Love was not a prerogative of the attractive.
He said, ‘Not an accident. An incident. As far as we know your daughter is fine.’
It was an evasion, also an economy with the truth, but he wanted as many answers as possible before the direction of his questions hit her.
‘When did you last see Jane?’ he asked.
Use of the Christian name seemed to reassure her.
‘At the weekend. Saturday,’ she replied.
So she had come here when she fled the social worker’s knock.
‘Were you expecting her?’ he asked.
‘No, I wasn’t. They came right out of the blue,’ she said in an aggrieved tone. ‘I had nothing ready, I might have been out or anything.’
He noted they but didn’t comment. He guessed that the moment she got wind he was interested in the boy, there would be no progress till she learned what was going on.
He said, ‘How long did Jane stay?’
‘Not long.’ A barrier had come down.
He said, ‘Overnight?’
‘No. She could have done. The room was there like it always has been.’
‘But she decided to leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘You quarrelled,’ he said flatly.
She hesitated then said, ‘What goes on between my daughter and myself is our business. What’s this all about, mister? You said she was all right …’ Then her face went stiff as if she at last felt the chilly north in his questions. ‘It’s not the boy, is it? Nothing’s happened to Oliver?’
There was nothing for it but another fragment of truth.
He said, ‘I’m sorry to say that your grandson is missing.’
Her hands seized the hem of her apron and threw it up to cover the lower part of her face beneath her fear-rounded eyes. It was a gesture he’d only ever seen in films, but there was nothing theatrical about it here in this cold front parlour.
‘Believe me, there’s probably nothing to worry about,’ he urged, justifying his lie with his need to get coherent answers from this woman who might turn out to be one of the last to see the boy alive. ‘Children go missing all the time. Most of them turn up fit and well.’
Slowly the apron was lowered. She didn’t believe him but her wish to be reassured was still stronger than her disbelief.
He went on quickly, ‘Tell me about the visit on Saturday. It might help.’
‘Has he run away, is that it?’
He didn’t answer but smiled encouragingly and felt a pang of shame as she took this for agreement.
‘And you’re wondering if he’s come up here.’
‘Do you think he would come back here?’ he asked. His intention was simple evasion, but he provoked an indignant response.
‘And why wouldn’t he? We get on all right, me and Oliver. But he’s only a baby, how’d he find his way up here? And do you think I’d not let her know straight off though that’d not be easy? We might not see eye to eye, and, yes, I think the lad’d be better off here where there’s someone at home all day, but I’d not keep quiet about something like that. What do you take me for?’
Cicero again felt the distress beneath the indignation, but he was a policeman, not a counsellor, and there were points to get clear.
‘Why wouldn’t it have been easy to let her know if Oliver had turned up here?’
‘Because I don’t have her address!’ she burst out. ‘There, that surprises you, doesn’t it? Four months since she left, and I still don’t have an address.’
‘But how do you keep in touch?’
‘She rings me, usually on a Sunday. We never talk long. She rings from a call box and them pips are forever pipping. I tell her to reverse the charge but she’s not a one to be obligated, our Jane.’
‘Did she ring this Sunday?’
‘No. Something better to do, I expect. Hold on! He’s not been missing since Sunday, has he? Not since Sunday?’
The thought constricted her throat, turning her voice to a thin squeak.
‘No,’ said Cicero. ‘So you’ve no way of getting in touch with her direct?’
‘She told me in emergencies I can ring that friend of hers, that Maddy.’ Her lips crinkled in distaste as she spoke the name.
Maddy. The name in the copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience.
‘Who’s Maddy?’ he asked.
‘One of her college teachers she got friendly with. Too friendly.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Family comes first in my book, mister. Besides, she must be near on my age!’ said Mrs Maguire indignantly. ‘If you must have friends, stick to your own age, your own kind, that’s what I say. I knew this Maddy would be the cause of trouble, and wasn’t I proved in the right of it?’
She nodded with the assurance of one used to being located in the right.
‘Was it this Maddy you quarrelled about then?’
‘It was too! Maybe only indirectly,’ she qualified with reluctant honesty. ‘But she was behind it all the same. Why should her telephone number be such a secret? It’s public property, isn’t it? It’s in the book.’
‘It is if you’ve got a surname and address,’ said Cicero. ‘Do you?’
‘No. I never cared to ask what she might be called and I’ve no idea where she lives,’ admitted the woman.
‘And who was it you gave her number to?’
‘It was this friend of Jane’s, a really nice girl, well spoken, the kind of friend Jane ought to have if she must have them. She’d lost touch with Jane since college and she was so keen to see her again that I saw no harm in giving her this Maddy’s number. It was shaming enough to have to admit I didn’t have an address for my own daughter without pretending there was no way I could get in touch with her.’
‘What was her name, this girl? And when did she call?’
‘Week before last it was. And her name was Mary Harper.’
‘Did Jane remember her?’
‘No. But the girl was wearing a ring so it seems likely it was her married name. But whether she knew her or not, there was no reason to get in such a tantrum when I told her I’d given this Mary the telephone number. Well, I wasn’t about to be lectured in my own house by my own daughter, I tell you! So we had words and she stalked out.’
‘What time was that?’
‘Not long after they arrived. About half past four.’
‘How did she look, your daughter?’
‘Like she always does. A bit pale maybe. She doesn’t eat enough, never has done. All this athletics stuff, it’s not right for a girl. The men are built for it, well, some men, but it’s a strain on a female, bound to be.’
‘And Noll? Oliver?’
‘Now he looked peaky, I thought. I said to her, what’re you thinking of, putting that child through such a journey …’
And once more she stopped in mid-stride as the fear she was trying to control by words, by anger, by indignation, was edged aside by a darker, heavier terror.
‘All these questions, what have they got to do with anything? What’s really happened, mister? He’s not just wandered off, has he? Well, has he? What’s really happened, mister?’
He said, ‘We don’t know, Mrs Maguire, and that’s the truth. But we’ve got to face the possibility that your grandson may have been abducted.’
It was a choice of horrors. Little boy lost, wandering around in the cold midwinter weather, or a kidnapped child in the hands of a deranged stranger. She sat there rocking to and fro, in the delusive belief that she was facing the worst. This was no time to hint at the third and most terrible possibility.
The door bell rang. He looked at the woman. She showed no sign of having heard it.
He went out into the tiny hallway and opened the front door.
Father Blake was standing there, his face pale with anger. Before Dog could speak, the priest demanded, ‘What the hell are you playing at, Inspector? Coming here with your stupid lies! What sort of man are you?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand …’
‘No, you don’t, do you? That’s clear enough. It’s people you’re dealing with … Why couldn’t you come right out and say it? Don’t we have a right to know what’s going on? Suppose that was how Mrs Maguire got to know, for God’s sake!’
His anger and anguish clearly went deep.
Dog said, ‘Please, Father. What’s happened? Tell me what’s happened and maybe I’ll be able to tell you what you want to know.’
The priest regarded him with deep mistrust, but he was back in control of himself.
‘All right, Cicero,’ he said. ‘I’ll play your game a little while. I’ve been sitting in my car listening to the radio, and I’ve just heard some policeman from Essex, Romchurch, isn’t it? That’s where you’re from?’
