Martin Edwards - Suspicious Minds

“She’s a remarkable girl, Harry. Even you don’t know the half of it about her.”

As Hamer spoke, his haggard expression softened. Harry wondered if he was being teased intentionally.

“Yeah, well.”

“Anyway, I mustn’t keep you. As I say, I’m sorry to hear about Stirrup. Troubles never come singly, do they?”

With a nod Hamer strolled away to the cafeteria. Harry wasn’t sorry to see him go. The liveliness which the first couple of glasses of champagne had sparked in him had gone. All at once he felt dry-mouthed and melancholic. His achievements of the past two days seemed to have diminished.

All right, so he and Valerie had become lovers. But from what she had said before parting, he sensed that last night meant less to her than to him. And with Hamer lurking in the background, evidently on the cosiest of terms with her, Harry still felt insecure.

And all right, so he had contributed by accident to the uncovering of a crime, but the mystery of Stirrup’s double loss remained. Curiosity kept nagging at him like a disgruntled wife. Until he understood the fate of Alison Stirrup and her step-daughter, there would be no rest for Harry Devlin.

A tiny blonde girl pretending to be Mandy Rice-Davies kept simpering, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” whenever a pause occurred in the conversation. She had a naive smile and, for all that her leather skirt was slit to the thigh, lacked both the wit and the cheap allure that Harry associated with Stephen Ward’s playmate. The arm round her shoulder belonged to a leering middle-aged man whose disconcerting facial resemblance to Tony Hancock was not matched by his Geordie accent and habit of guffawing at his own unfunny jokes. Harry understood that from nine to five the couple played the parts of Bryan Grealish’s insurance broker and his secretary. He hoped those roles suited them better.

The party was in full swing and the Gracie Fields Room in the Majestic was packed to capacity. The walls were adorned with life-size cardboard cut-outs of the heads and shoulders of sixties heroes like John F. Kennedy and Bob Dylan. Over the hum of conversation, Gene Pitney wailed about his abortive journey back to Tulsa and complained that he could never, never, never go home again.

Talk had turned to the permissive society and the abolition of capital punishment. Slipping out of character, the insurance man tapped a pipe-smoking Harold Wilson on the shoulder and said, “What about deterrence, then? Take this bugger The Beast for instance. Now tell me this…”

Harry decided it was time to move on. At least that was in keeping with his chosen character. Richard Kimble, the TV fugitive who never had much luck catching up with the one-armed man seen running away from the scene of a crime. Distantly Harry could recall from his youth the occasional graffito saying: KIMBLE IS INNOCENT. But he couldn’t recall whether in the end justice had been done.

In the corner of the room Valerie, dressed as Diana Ross in her Supremes hey-day, was being chatted up by a hairy-chested Fred Flintstone. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Harry picked up another glass of wine from a tray carried by a girl made up to look like a youthful Mary Quant.

“Having fun?”

He turned to face a mask of mascara topped with a mass of platinum blonde hair. It took him a moment to penetrate the disguise and identify Grealish’s girlfriend. What was her name? Stephanie, yes.

“‘ I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself. ’”

“ What?”

“You’re Dusty Springfield, right?” He sighed. “That was the best of her songs.”

“Yeah?” The girl wasn’t into pop history. She studied him with a frown. “You haven’t bothered to dress up. I think you’re the only one here in a suit.”

“Do you mind?” Harry tried to explain about Kimble, the man suspected of a crime he did not commit, but Stephanie had not even seen the repeats on Channel 4 and he soon gave up.

“So where’s Bryan — or should I say Elvis?” Grealish made a good Presley; he had the King’s lip curl off to perfection. “I haven’t seen him for a while. Last time I spotted him he was deep in conversation with one of the coppers from Z-Cars.”

“His accountant, would you believe?” Stephanie yawned. “They went off in a huddle. I got told to circulate.”

“The perfect hostess?”

“Do me a favour, I’m bored stiff. And as for bloody Bryan, he’s so wrapped up in talking about his money and his deals, he wouldn’t notice if I stripped off and lay down in the middle of the floor.”

“Try it. The Gracie Fields Room would never be the same again.”

“You must be joking. And who was Gracie Fields anyway?”

Harry thought about explaining that all the public rooms here were named after stars of yesteryear who had appeared at long-gone New Brighton landmarks like the Tivoli or Winter Gardens, but decided against it. To Stephanie, even the sixties were a bygone age.

“Men!” she snorted. He had the feeling she liked to have an audience, even if only of one mere male. “No consideration. Bryan’s a typical feller. No different really from Claire’s old man.”

“You’ve met Jack Stirrup?”

“There was a parents’ day at school. Claire introduced us. He thought the sun shone out of her backside.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound, like, callous.” She shivered and Harry didn’t think she was being theatrical. “The sooner they catch him, the better.”

“The Beast?”

“Right. The crazy bastard. It’s frightening. That’s two girls I know he’s attacked. Makes you feel he’s getting closer all the time. And then there’s the blonde hair thing. I haven’t gone out on my own since the papers wrote about that.”

“Claire wasn’t blonde.”

“No. You’d have thought she was safe. Shows you, doesn’t it? No one’s safe.”

“You said you knew someone else, another of The Beast’s victims.”

“Right. Gina. Gina Jean-Jacques. She goes to the same school — Hilbre Hall.”

Harry stared at her. “Jean-Jacques, you say?”

“Right. Why?”

“The name reminds me of someone, that’s all. Anyway, what happened to her?”

Stephanie Elwiss looked at the floor. All of a sudden Harry remembered he was speaking to a young girl whose sophistication was as easy to wipe away as Dusty’s make-up.

“She was raped. One day when she was walking along the Wirral Way at Caldy. It’s a public place, you’d never believe anything could happen to you there in broad daylight. But it did.”

“Do you know Gina well?”

“We were friends for a while. Not so much now. She’s young for her age. And terribly shy, more interested in her ponies than boys. Different from me. When I got mixed up with Bryan, I reckon she decided I was a bit of a slut.”

“How is she now?”

“How would you be? I went to see her once, we all did. It was like meeting a different person, Claire said the same. Gina always used to be going on about her bloody horses. When I went to see her, she didn’t mention them once. As if she’d grown up overnight and hated it.”

“You talked about her to Claire? I didn’t realise you two saw each other out of school.”

“We didn’t, as a rule. No, she came round to the house last Thursday. Bryan was busy, so I was spending the evening at home with Mum.”

“So this was out of the ordinary? A visit from Claire on the off chance that you were in for once?”

“What are you getting at?”

“No idea. I’m interested, though. Jack Stirrup’s a good client of mine. Anything I can do to cast a little light on what happened to Claire will help.”