M Beaton - There Goes The Bride

‘That’s odd,’ said Agatha when the brief video had finished. ‘He never appealed to anyone who might be holding her to let her go. Where is Sharon’s report? No, don’t worry. It’ll be here somewhere.’

Agatha found Sharon’s report and studied it carefully. Sharon had been very thorough. School friends and teachers had been questioned along with next-door neighbours and local shops. She had left school two weeks ago to go home and seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

Still smarting at what she felt were her inadequacies as a detective, Agatha decided to see what she could find out about the girl herself.

The Ballards lived in a five-storey block of flats off a roundabout on the Evesham Road out of Mircester. It all looked very respectable, with private parking, no graffiti, and a tiny mowed piece of grass and flowerbeds along the edge of the car park.

Agatha was about to get out of the car when a thought struck her. Surely the parents, neighbours and friends would all just say the same thing. The girl’s room would have been thoroughly searched. She remembered from the notes, Trixie’s computer had been studied in case some paedophile had been grooming her.

Leaning back in the car, Agatha lit a cigarette and brought the faces of the parents up into her mind’s eye. The father’s face had looked bloated. Grief or drink?

A memory from her own childhood surfaced in her mind. Her parents had both been alcoholics. One night she had awakened to find her father standing at the end of her bed. ‘Move over, darling,’ he’d said.

And young Agatha had opened her mouth and screamed the place down. Her mother had come tottering in and her parents had ended up having a vicious fight.

Had daddy tried anything on with young Trixie? Now, if you were a fifteen-year-old, would you commit suicide? There was a lot of that around. But the reports had her down as a sensible girl, fairly good at exams.

What would I do? wondered Agatha.

With all the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, lousy jobs were hard to find, the sort of jobs where they didn’t bother about employment details. She hoped Trixie hadn’t gone to London, where there were plenty waiting to prey on runaways and put them into prostitution.

She was an ordinary-looking girl, tall for her age, with mousy hair. But if she dyed her hair and wore glasses, she could change her appearance.

What would I do? thought Agatha again. She lit another cigarette.

Work? Chambermaid or dishwasher. That might be it. Maybe not too far away. The report said she had never been out of Mircester before. She was too tall and not nearly pretty enough to attract a paedophile. She could pass for seventeen or eighteen.

She returned to the office in time for the evening briefing. ‘Sharon, you’ve done very good work on this girl, Trixie Ballard,’ said Agatha. ‘But I’ve got a feeling there might be trouble with the father. I don’t think she’s been snatched, and from that report from the school counsellor, she doesn’t seem the suicidal type. It’s a wild guess, but she might be working somewhere where they aren’t too fussy about employment legalities. I want you all to take tomorrow to check hotels for chambermaids and restaurants for dishwashers. Jobs like that.’

After briefing them, Agatha went wearily home. Charles had left. She fed the cats and let them out into the garden. She would start work on the Trixie case in the morning.

Toni had enjoyed her brief time of being her own boss. She felt she’d taken a great step backwards to be working for Agatha again. She was grateful to Agatha – too grateful – for all the help she had given her.

Most of the girls she had been to school with had settled for unexciting jobs. Still, thought Toni, they might turn out to be a good source of information as to low-paid jobs where too many questions might not be asked. Toni had opted to search the hotels. Trixie would need somewhere to stay.

Toni began by calling at Mircester’s main supermarket. She walked right around the back of the building to where she knew the staff often stood outside, having a smoke.

Two of her old school friends were there. A thin, scrawny, spotty girl called Chelsea hailed her. ‘If it isn’t our famous tec. What you doing, babes?’

‘I’m looking for Trixie Ballard. Seen anything of her?’

Her companion Tracy, small and fat with lank hair, jeered, ‘Oh, sure. With all the cops in Britain looking for her?’

‘Just wondered,’ said Toni and walked hurriedly away. She realized that if she questioned them about hotels where Trixie might have found work, they would gossip all over the supermarket and, if Trixie was in hiding in one of the hotels, she might get to hear of it.

The time to hit the hotels would be just after ten o’clock, when guests would be expected to vacate their rooms. At the posher hotels it would be midday. At least Mircester was only a market town. A big city like London or Manchester would be a nightmare.

She checked her list. There were five hotels. The George was the biggest but she couldn’t imagine them employing someone without a social security number.

Then there was the Palace – same thing. The Country Inn was a possibility.

She went round to the staff entrance. A woman in a white overall came out and dumped rubbish in one of the bins and went in again. Toni went off and bought a white overall, put it on, returned to the Country Inn and boldly walked in by the service entrance and up the stairs.

She went up and down stairs and along corridors, checking into rooms where the maids were working, but could not see any sign of anyone who looked like Trixie. In fact, most of the voices she heard sounded Polish.

Toni finally gave up and went back to her car. Two hotels left, the Berkeley and the Townhouse. The Berkeley was actually a motel out on the ring road. That seemed the more hopeful of the two.

It was built like an E with the central bar missing. All she had to do was park in the courtyard to get a clear view of the maids coming in and out as they worked on the various rooms.

Not one of them looked like Trixie. Without much hope, she drove to the Townhouse. It was a small seedy-looking hotel.

Time had passed and surely the rooms would have been cleaned. Toni drove to the side of the hotel where she had a good view of the service entrance and waited. By late afternoon, the maids began to check out. There were about six of them but no Trixie.

She checked into the office for the final briefing. ‘Maybe we’ll give it one more morning tomorrow,’ said Agatha, ‘and then that’s that.’

Sharon caught up with Toni outside. ‘You’re looking right dismal these days, Tone. Is it that fellow, Perry?’

‘It’s part that. He had the cheek to send me flowers and keep phoning. He’s finally given up. The liar kept saying it was a setup and he’d never seen the woman before.’

‘What’s the other thing?’

‘I’d like to be my own boss again.’

‘You could ask Agatha,’ suggested Sharon. ‘’Member she originally offered to set you up?’

‘I want to be totally independent of Agatha. After all she’s done for me, I don’t feel like taking on any more gratitude. And I wouldn’t be free of her. She’d be round checking the books and giving unwanted advice.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Sharon. ‘There’s a sloppy movie, To You My Love, on at the Odeon. It’s a bit of a pinch of Sleepless in Seattle. We could grab a burger and then go there.’

Toni grinned and put an arm around Sharon’s chubby shoulders. ‘Sounds good to me.’

Agatha watched them from the office window. Toni was wearing a black T-shirt, short denim skirt with a broad belt slung low over it and flat sandals. The sun glinted on her fair hair. Sharon was in her usual ragbag of fashions, chattering away animatedly.