Martin Edwards - Suspicious Minds

“For you.”

“I’ll call back.”

“Not so fast. It’s Jonah Deegan. Let’s hope he’s not ringing to tell us he’s found Alison Stirrup buried under the floor at Prospect House.”

Harry winced. “Put him through.”

Jonah’s voice sounded different from usual. It took Harry a few moments to identify the change. The habitual note of complaint was gone. The old detective sounded smug. “What is it, Jonah?”

“No need to be sharp, Harry. This call box is costing me money.”

“Put it on your bill and spit out what you have to say.”

“We need to meet. There’s plenty to tell you and I hate the bloody phone anyway. Not in your office, it’ll be like a furnace on a day like today. Somewhere out of doors, get a breath of air.”

“I’m due in court in ten minutes. I should be free by twelve. I’ll see you in the garden at the back of the Bluecoat if you like. And Jonah, the last I saw of you, you were coming out of the Probate Registry, for God’s sake. What’s your news?”

“Well, it’s a long story.”

Watching his partner’s frustration grow with Jonah’s every prevarication, Jim winked. He was enjoying the build-up as much as the old man.

Harry controlled himself with an effort. “Jonah, you’re obviously dying to tell me something. If you want me to rush out to the Bluecoat, you’d better give me some idea of why.”

“It’s about Mrs. Alison Stirrup, you see.”

Harry felt his stomach muscles tighten.

“Yes, yes, what about her?”

At the other end of the line Jonah Deegan paused like an old ham actor before speaking again.

“She’s alive and well and living in sin with a Mrs. Catherine Morgan.”

Today, as always, the calm of the courtyard garden at the Bluecoat was as welcome as it was unexpected. This was a sanctuary for refugees from urban life. Less than one hundred yards away people swarmed through the city’s shopping centre but here you could forget for a while the noise and ugliness of the world outside.

Harry walked through the back door of the art gallery building into the open air. Jonah was sitting on a wooden seat in the midst of trees and troughs of flowers. The old man was rolling a cigarette, careless of the tobacco he spilled on the ground.

“Jonah, you’d pollute the Garden of Eden.”

“Stop mithering and take the weight off your feet. I’ve earned this. Want one?”

“No thanks.” Harry was briefly nonplussed by the uncharacteristic generosity until he remembered that Jonah knew he had given up the weed.

Jonah finished his act of creation, lit up and then puffed reflectively, testing Harry’s patience to the limit.

“All right, this place, isn’t it? Peaceful.”

Aware that he was being teased, Harry spoke in a mild tone. “You dragged me over here,” he said. “What’s your news?”

“All in good time, Harry.” Jonah exhaled and a smile began to scale his rocky features. “Surprised you, did it?”

Harry could still scarcely believe what the detective had said on the phone, but he’d turned the idea of a relationship between Alison and Cathy over in his mind. And the more he considered the new picture, the more he began to understand.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

Jonah tugged at one of the hairs growing from his nostrils. “Is the Pope a Catholic? I tell you, those women are holed up together, close and cosy as peas in a pod.”

“Go on.”

“Sure you wouldn’t like a smoke?”

Jonah had the true storyteller’s knack of building suspense, Harry thought to himself. He was in the wrong job.

“Give me a break, Jonah. I know you’re dying to get it off your chest.”

“All right then.’ Jonah cleared his throat in ceremonial fashion, like a scruffy Poirot, about to reveal all to hapless Hastings.

“See, the problem I’ve had all along is the lack of leads. No one had any idea what this Alison Stirrup was up to. I had to assume she was alive until the opposite was proved. Trouble was, I had nowhere special to look.”

He paused, as if expecting sympathy. Harry waited for him to continue.

“So I started by trying to think of what she might be up to if she’d deliberately decided to cut herself off. Maybe with some bloke Stirrup knew nothing about. Yet no one so much as hinted at a boyfriend in the background.”

“Doreen Capstick was adamant there was no one when I spoke to her. Said the same to you, I imagine.”

Jonah winced at the memory. “Mutton dressed as lamb, that one. No way would her little girl play fast and loose. How often have I heard that from parents in my time? Not that I thought she was lying. Mrs. Capstick hates Stirrup, she’d have been glad for Alison to give him the elbow. She just hadn’t been let into the secret.

“Any road, I dug around a bit, didn’t turn up anything new. You could count her friends on the fingers of one hand and she didn’t seem on the same wavelength as her mother. Made me wonder if she hadn’t been trying to escape the Capstick woman as well as Stirrup.”

Jonah’s voice had lost its histrionic edge. He was talking to himself now and Harry felt he was catching a glimpse of the shrewd policeman Jonah had once been.

“I was trying to work out what Alison was like. I talked to her neighbours in those posh houses in Caldy, but the size of the bloody gardens gives people no choice but to keep to themselves. They agreed on a few things. She was a loner. Hard to get to know, not any kind of a flirt. Didn’t sound to me like a happy woman, though with a husband like Stirrup and a step-daughter who could be a real little cow, who could blame her?”

He finished his cigarette and had ground it with his heel into the path before Harry could utter an environmentally conscious word of reproach.

“She read a lot, people said, long boring novels. And made patchwork quilts — that was the closest she came to a passion. They take an age to design and stitch together, apparently. Lonely business, by the sound of it. Nobody could tell me anything else. When you’d said that, you’d summed her up.”

A rare cloud masked the sun. It was as hot as ever in this endless summer, but Harry shivered. Although he had known Alison Stirrup for years, he could not add to Deegan’s thumbnail sketch of her. How little we really know of the people we meet in daily life, he thought, how seldom we guess what lies behind the camouflage of social conversation.

“One thing bothered me. She had a friend I couldn’t get to see. The wife of Trevor Morgan. Stirrup told me the two of them were pally, but it turned out Cathy Morgan had done a flit a few weeks before Alison disappeared. That got me interested. I decided to find out a little more about Mrs. Morgan. And, curiouser and curiouser, there were several similarities between her case and Alison’s. A sudden departure, tracks well covered. No known boyfriends lurking in the background. One big difference, though. Cathy Morgan was loaded.”

Harry stared. “Loaded?”

“Her father was Paul Newman. The builder, not the film star. You’ll have heard of Newman’s Estates, more than likely. They threw up several of those barrack estates over the water. Mostly on the edge of Birkenhead. Newman died in the early seventies before Cathy got married. He and his wife only had the one kid. They’d had Cathy late in life and before long the old girl went senile. She had to go into a home and bloody Cathy never bothered much with her. And though the mother died six months ago, Trevor Morgan told me he thought she was still alive.”

“Didn’t he realise there was money in the family?”

Deegan shook his head. “Nor did I till I checked up. The day you saw me coming out of the Probate Registry, in fact.”