No, this was not about Connie, but something she had said or done kept niggling and scratching in the subconscious. Every time Jill recollected the profile etched against the window, decorated by a crystal tear—and the image was persistent, like that pop tune you cannot stop humming—an alarm went off.
‘Think of something else,” Inspector Tierce advised out loud, competing against the hair dryer’s breathy roar. Nearly too late to post greetings cards, not that she’d bought them yet. She had bought some in good time one year. They were in A Safe Place to this day, waiting to be found.
Oh dear, she was better off thinking about the Mitzi Field case. Very well, Noel Sarum was in the clear. He could have printed that school magazine himself, or altered the date, but only in a Golden Age detective story. He’d been far away, and Connie French had confirmed his reason for haunting Grand Drive at a particular time of year. Further, while everyone was a potential life-taker, Noel Sarum belonged at the safest, last-resort end of the spectrum.
And that revived Superintendent Haggard’s imperfect crime. She could picture a man on perhaps his first and last sojourn in the city, stopping at a street woman’s signal and unrecognized, very likely unseen, driving away with her. To drive on, soon afterwards, taking care to stay away.
“Hopeless,” Jill mumbled and, skipping breakfast, went off to her broom closet, cardboard-flavored coffee, and the case file.
It assured her that everything needful had been done. A fruitless check for witnesses to the crime, an unrewarding search for tire tracks, footprints, any physical evidence apart from Mitzi Field’s body. Local and then regional sexual offenders interrogated. Other prostitutes questioned, fellow tenants of her last known address, the demolished squat, traced and interviewed.
Nothing to go on; conscientious Detective-Inspector Poole, exactly the breed of plodder who catches most criminals, had demonstrated that if nothing else. Or had he?
Inspector Tierce stood up awkwardly, massaging scar tissue through her skirt. She hadn’t thought the location significant, merely incongruous, when Superintendent Haggard told her of it. Previous reading of the file had left her cold. But now it was different because... because of Connie French. Something—what?—that she’d said last night.
She’d said so much, that was the snag. Squinting, lips moving silently, Jill talked herself through a lengthy and meandering conversation. Until reaching the point where Connie had lamented an uncaring daughter... bingo.
Children coming home for the holidays, of course. That’s what families did at Christmas, families and friends of the family. Driven by nostalgia, tradition, the chance to purge year-long offenses during the annual truce, or (if mercenary souls) simply to collect presents, they headed for hearth and home.
She leafed through to a terse section of the dossier, the London end. A few discreet sentences covered Mitzi’s life from just before her ninth birthday until she absconded from the council home six years later.
Lots of digging needed. Inspector Tierce felt sorry for Len Poole, and profoundly grateful that she did not have to follow up her idea.
Inspector Poole, a careworn, resigned character, took one look at the name on the file and groaned, “Haggard’s got you at it as well, has he? Wish he’d mind his own business.”
“Amen to that, but I’m stuck with it. Len, what was that girl doing on Grand Drive? Haggard thinks she took a client to a road full of snobs and busy-bodies because she didn’t know any better. Or the punter was ignorant and Mitzi Field didn’t care. Did you buy that?”
“No opinion—I’d need facts to form one, and the only certainty was that she was killed there.” He wasn’t being awkward, that was how his mind worked. “Long way to go for a quickie in a motor, right enough. Then again, Vice was chasing street prozzies at the time, she might have wanted to get well away from the redlight area.”
“Supposing,” said Jill, “she wasn’t taken to Grand Drive and killed? Supposing she was leaving there, heading back to her beat, when it happened?”
“I’m not quite with you.”
“She didn’t walk all the way, wasn’t dressed for it, therefore she went in a car, that’s the conventional wisdom. Doesn’t follow. A bus runs from dockland to a stop round the corner from Grand Drive every half hour. She could have taken herself there, right? Visited somebody, left again, and either her attacker was waiting, or he was the one she’d called on, and he chased her out of doors.”
“Try reading the file,” Inspector Poole urged. “No known sex offenders among the residents, remember. We grilled all Les Girls, whether or not they’d associated with Ms. Field, and none of them had a client in Grand Drive; far as they were aware, that is. Down-market hookers don’t keep names and addresses. Her mates were sure Mitzi had never been up there before.”
“Yes, but it was Christmas, Len. When we all get sudden urges to see Mum and Dad, look up Auntie Flo, send a card to that nice former neighbor who nursed us through whooping cough. Mitzi Field had a family of sorts, once upon a time.”
Digesting the implications, Inspector Poole said, “Crumbs.” He did not go in for bad language. “You do get ‘em. the wild hunches. All right, she was Mitzi Field, but her mother remarried, to a man called, don’t tell me... Edwardes. The stepfather who supposedly seduced the little girl. The mother died in 1984. Edwardes was never charged, lack of evidence, they just took the child away. He’d dropped off the radar screen by 1990, dead or gone abroad, certainly hasn’t paid tax or claimed unemployment benefits for a long time. All in the file. dear. I may be slow but I ain’t stupid.”
“Perish the thought. But that still leaves Auntie Flo and the kindly neighbor.”
“Crumbs,” he repeated, even more feelingly, “you don’t want much. We’re talking ten, fifteen years back, and in London.” Inspector Poole took possession of the file. “It’s a thought, I can’t deny it. More’s the pity.”
On Christmas Eve afternoon, Len Poole rapped jauntily at Jill’s office door. “London doesn’t get any better. I’ve had two days up there, and how those lads in the Met stand the life is beyond me. Noise, pollution, bad manners, homeless beggars everywhere. But I did find a helpful social worker, they do exist even if it’s an endangered species, and this chap had a good memory-
“Great idea of yours—but I’m afraid James Edwardes. Mitzi’s allegedly wicked stepfather, doesn’t live at Grand Drive. He works the fairs in the Republic of Ireland, hasn’t been in England for years.”
Hitching half his skinny rump onto the corner of the desk, Inspector Poole added innocently, “No trace of Auntie Flo. But I’ll tell you who did have a Grand Drive address until recently—Anthony Challis.”
Since he had to have worked hard and fast and was full of himself over it, Jill Tierce played along. “Challis?”
“He lodged with Mitzi’s family in the eighties. Freelance electrician, good earner, about to get married. But then Mitzi Field, only she was little Dorothy then, accused nice Mr. Challis of doing things to her. Her mother called the police, and then Dorothy admitted it wasn’t Challis after all, it was her stepfather who kept raping her.” Len Poole grimaced distastefully. “Ugly... my tame social worker said he’d never believed Challis had touched her. What it was, they discovered, Edwardes not only abused her, he practically brainwashed the poor kid, said she’d be struck down if she told on him. When it got too much for her, she accused Tony Challis—ironically enough, because he was kind, would never hurt her. She’d just wanted it out in the open, so the grownups would make it stop. Ruining Challis wasn’t on her agenda, if she had such a thing, but that was the effect.”