They stepped to one side and the barber made a token effort at sweeping the floor whilst trying to eavesdrop.
“What can I do for you?”
“Still got contacts over the water?”
Jonah had been in the Merseyside police from leaving school until retirement. He’d been a good detective by all accounts, though the sights and sounds of the city’s twilight world had soured his view of the human race. Long since divorced, he lived in a flat near the Anglican cathedral with an endless supply of foul-smelling cigarettes for company. Nowadays he worked for himself, mostly chasing — or limping after — the occasional debt. And what he lacked in social graces he made up for with cussed persistence.
“I’d like you to find the answer to a question for me.”
“Ask away.”
Harry explained about the police interrogation of Jack Stirrup. “Someone’s stirring them up. Must be. Missing persons usually rate low on the priority list.”
Jonah nodded. “And you want to know who’s stirring? I’ve heard of this Bolus. He’s just a whippersnapper. Doubt if he’s thirty. I’ll have a word round.”
“Thanks.”
“It’ll cost, mind.”
“Jack Stirrup can afford it.”
“The price went up when you made the crack about this cardigan.”
“You’re a hard man, Jonah. Give me a ring at the office when you have any news.”
Outside the sky was cloud-free. Mid-afternoon on the hottest day of the year so far and Liverpudlians were relishing it, equally careless of sunstroke and skin cancer. In Church Street, opportunistic vendors bellowed the price of dark glasses whose provenance and effectiveness were both in doubt. Shirt-sleeved old men sat on benches, picking their noses and eyeing the women who passed them by.
Harry looked at the women too. Overweight middle-aged ladies panting as they lugged heavily-laden shopping baskets towards the bus stop. Mothers in sleeveless dresses, dragging fractious children away from ice-cream barrows. And teenagers in tight tee-shirts and shorts, displaying figures good, bad and indifferent. One redhead had emblazoned on her ample chest: I’m not fat — just pregnant.
Several girls had fair hair and Harry wondered how many of them feared that one day soon they might become a name in the paper when The Beast struck again. As surely he would. The thought angered Harry. Why should they not be safe? Why should their sex and their age and the colour of their hair make them vulnerable to a man for whom they were not living individuals but simply lumps of female flesh? His head said that Bernard’s lynch-mob justice never worked. His heart was not so sure.
All was quiet back at the office. He was greeted by Francesca, the temp who was deputising whilst his secretary and her family sunned themselves on the Algarve. A slender girl whose perm resembled an exotic form of marine life, Francesca had a Shakespearean indifference towards consistency in spelling. The shortness of her skirts and the smoothness of her bare legs were scant compensation for her inability to type accurately at speed.
“Too hot to be inside working on a day like this!”
Ten times at least that week she had greeted him with the same remark. Harry responded with a weary smile and asked if there were any messages.
“On your desk, together with your post.”
Down the corridor, a door swung open and a big, bearded man emerged. Jim Crusoe, his partner, back after a morning spent with an old lady in Formby who wanted to add an umpteenth codicil to her will. Rumour claimed she had ambitions for a place in The Guinness Book of Records. More testamentary dispositions than she had personal effects.
“Good lunch? Christ, old son, call that a haircut? You haven’t been to Sweeney Todd’s again? He could make a Rasta look like Dennis the Menace.”
“Does wonders for my street cred down at the magistrates’.”
“Don’t bank on it. Anyway, what’s the latest on Jack Stirrup?”
Harry described his visit to Prospect House. “He’s holding back on me, Jim. I’m certain of that, but nothing else.”
“You think Alison’s dead?”
“Wish I knew.”
“You know your trouble.”
“No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
“You’re too interested in the truth to be a defence lawyer. If I’d killed someone, I’d want a brief who wasn’t too fussy about right. A Ruby Fingall. No wonder he’s cornered the market in big league villainy.”
“Stirrup’s not short of a few bob.”
“But he’s an amateur in crime, isn’t he? No track record. Piling the booze high and flogging it cheap is no training for a career in homicide.” Jim put a huge hand to his mouth in mock embarrassment. “Sorry. You’re going to remind me about the golden thread. Our client’s guilty until proved innocent and all that leader column garbage.”
“So you think he killed her?”
Jim Crusoe looked him in the eye. “Let’s just say I’ve seen him lose his rag a time or two and I wouldn’t like to be in his way when it happens. And I went over to Prospect House during the sale negotiations. The grounds are a jungle. You could hide half the bodies from West Kirby cemetery there.”
“Careful, I may start thinking you’re the one who got the police to swarm over there.”
“Not me, old son. I’d hate to be proved right and see Jack behind bars. Believe me, we need his fees.”
They parted and Harry had done an hour’s much-needed desk work when the phone rang and Jonah Deegan spoke his name.
“Got something? That was quick.”
“I can still pull a few strings.” Jonah could make even a boast sound like a lament.
“And?”
“Name Doreen Capstick mean anything to you?”
“Stirrup’s motherin-law.”
“Right. She’s the one who’s agitating. Ringing the station by the hour complaining about the lack of progress in finding her daughter. She’s convinced the marriage was on the rocks and that Stirrup topped the girl rather than see her run back to mummy.”
Even from his brief acquaintance with Alison, Harry doubted whether she would have been eager to take refuge with her loud and tiresome mother except as a last resort.
“Anything else?”
“It’s a genuine mystery.” Jonah didn’t give the impression of being intrigued. “No evidence to pin anything on your bloke. And no explanation of the woman’s disappearance. The betting is, she had another man on the quiet. But if so, it was very, very quiet.”
“Thanks, Jonah. Send me your bill.”
“I posted it five minutes ago.”
While Harry mulled over the news, Francesca came in and left her day’s work for him to check, together with a handful of phone messages. He rifled through the papers, cringing at the ragged margins and mistakes in the correspondence, signing all the letters which were not so ineptly presented as to make re-typing essential. This week’s investment in correction fluid alone could send the firm into the red.
Two of the telephone calls made him pause. Valerie had rung — it must be her from the return call number, though Francesca’s spelling of Kaiwar was imaginative and wildly inaccurate. sorry can’t make it tonight call tomorrow and fix something up was the message, printed out in a child-like, unformed hand. Harry swore, crumpled the piece of paper into a ball and hurled it into the litter basket.
And Stirrup had been on as well. The message was stark. ring back asap. Such a command from a blue-chip client was not to be ignored, but Harry allowed himself a few moments of speculation before picking up the phone. Were the police pressing harder? He found himself hoping desperately that there was good news at last, that the woman had by some miracle reappeared.
As soon as Stirrup’s voice came on to the other end of the line, Harry realised the social mood of the previous evening had evaporated.
“I want you to do something for me and do it fast.”
Words to make any solicitor quail. Harry said cautiously, “What’s the problem, Jack?”