Tim Vicary - A Game of Proof

‘Archibald Mullen, number 17, ’cross the road.’ The man jerked his thumb. ‘You from t’landlord, are you?’

‘No. I’m … Simon’s stepfather.’

‘Oh. Well, you won’t want to hear what I say then.’ The old man shuffled away.

‘No, wait!’ Bob grabbed his arm. ‘What do you want to say?’

The man stood in the gutter in his carpet slippers, considering. Then he pulled an ancient, smelly pipe out of his cardigan pocket, turned the bowl upside down, and began to scrape ash out if it with a nicotine stained little finger. ‘Well, about all’t rows, that’s all.’

‘What rows? Tell me. Please — it might be important!’

The old man inspected him quizzically. ‘Don’t know as I should, you being his stepdad.’ He sucked his pipe experimentally.

‘Look, I really need to know. My daughter’s missing and I’m trying to find her. Was there a girl here last night? Do you know?’

‘Girl? Aye, there might have been. What’s your daughter look like then?’

Bob began to describe her, while the old man found a tobacco pouch in his pocket and began filling the bowl of the pipe. He looked down, absorbed in the task, and Bob suppressed a rising tide of rage as he was forced to describe the most precious thing in his life to the top of the old bastard’s greasy flat cap. But when he mentioned Emily’s red and blue leather coat the narrow, wizened face looked up sharply.

‘Aye, that’s it. That’s what she was wearing.’

Hope flashed through him, like a knife. ‘What who was wearing? Tell me — what did you see?’

‘Well …’ He had the wretched pipe full now, and proceeded to put it in his mouth, strike a match, cup his wrinkled hands around the bowl, and draw slow measured puffs of smoke for what seemed like an age. ‘It was last night about half ten, summat like that. I were off to bed when late News came on, I don’t watch that, seen it all earlier like, and I were in me nightshirt just coming out o’t bathroom after doing me teeth — that’s my bedroom over there, just over’t yellow door, so I’ve got a clear view …’ The pipe, it appeared, was going out. A second match was struck, held between cupped hands over the bowl, the flame ducked downwards.

‘Yes. What did you see?’

‘Well there’s this row, see. Slamming doors and screaming — a lass and a feller, like. So I looked — I mean, I’m not right nosey like some folk, but it’s human nature like, in’t it?’

‘ What did you see?’ Bob was not a violent man, but the desire to snatch the pipe from the man’s mouth and crush it underfoot was becoming so overpowering that he had to clasp his hands behind his back.

‘Well, the young lass, the one in the blue and red coat, she were in’t middle o’t road with him, yelling at each other fit to bust. Right old ding-dong it were!’

‘By he , you mean the young man who lives here, do you? Simon Newby?’

‘Is that his name? Aye. I recognised him well enough. I’d seen t’lassie before, a few times, like. Anyhow, he’s trying to drag her back inside, but she won’t come, so he smacks her in’t chops. A fair clout, it were. Knocks her into’t side o’ yon car.’ The old man took the pipe from his mouth to indicate a battered hatchback across the street, and grinned evilly. ‘Like proper wild west it were! Anyhow she storms off up street, and he goes back inside. For a bit.’

‘For a bit? You mean he came out again?’

‘Aye. After about ten, twenty minutes. Got in that old Escort of his and drove off. Haven’t seen him since. Not here now is it?’

Simon’s car was certainly missing. Anger flooded through Bob — Simon had hit Emily, so hard that she’d fallen against the side of a car! He wrote down the old man’s name and address, then got back in his car to drive home.

I knew I’d find something if I tried, he thought. I’ve really got something, at last! I’ll go home and phone the police and then come out again and look for that bastard Simon.

But why would Simon hit Emily?

‘We’re ready for you now, Sarah.’ Terry came back into the dreary functional waiting room. Sarah sat hunched up next to a woman constable, and seemed to have shrunk, somehow. ‘Are you sure you can manage this?’

‘No, I’m not sure.’ Was it the reflected light from the vile green plastic sofa that made her face look so seasick, or was she really ill, he wondered?

‘We can wait a while if you like.’

‘No.’ She took a deep breath, and stood up. ‘Let’s get it over with.’ The WPC held open the door and Sarah walked through it alone. Terry and the WPC followed.

The body was just across the corridor, laid out on a trolley in the morgue. It was covered with a sheet, and everything in the room had been carefully tidied up — no open chest wounds in sight, no skulls sawn in half, no pickled internal organs. Just the instruments, washed and clean in their places and the body fridges all along one wall, the doors carefully closed like long narrow lockers in a changing room. It was the smell that struck Sarah first. Disinfectant like in a hospital, but something quite unlike a hospital too. Formaldehyde? You don’t preserve dead things in hospitals, you try to keep them alive.

And then the silence. The forensic pathologist, Dr Jones, stood by the head of the trolley, his hair covered by a white cap, his young face in the round glasses composed in respectful solemnity. He might be arrogant but he knew how to behave before grieving relatives, Terry thought. Sarah’s shoes squeaked on the vinyl floor as she walked towards the trolley. Terry was close behind her on one side, the WPC on the other, both ready to catch her if she fainted.

‘I’m the forensic pathologist, Mrs Newby,’ Andrew Jones said. ‘We’d just like you to look at her face, that’s all, and tell us if you recognise the body. Let me know when you’re ready.’

Sarah met his eyes, and nodded. Very gently, as though taking infinite care not to hurt the body any more, he pulled back the sheet as far as the chin. The great gaping wound in the throat, tactfully covered with a second sheet, remained hidden. But nothing could hide the bruise on the left cheek, or the marks of leaves and sticks in the rigid waxy pallor of the lifeless skin. Sarah shuddered, and almost fell. Terry and the WPC caught her elbows. Under his hands Terry could feel her trembling, trembling …

‘Well,’ he said very softly. ‘Sarah, is it her?’

The trembling was worse now. Sarah leaned forward and gripped the side of the trolley with both hands, shaking her head vigorously.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘No, it isn’t Emily. No, no, no, it’s not! It’s not her, no, NO, NO!’ She turned to look up into Terry’s stunned eyes. Tears were flooding down her cheeks. ‘It isn’t her, Terry, it’s not Emily, oh thank God!’

He put his arms round her and held her, and thought thank God too, the poor woman, but who is it? Over Sarah’s shoulder he caught Dr Jones’s raised eyebrows and after another age of sobbing she drew back from him and he asked what he had to ask, for formality’s sake only.

‘So if it’s not your daughter, Sarah, do you have any idea who this person is?’

The difference between a smile of relief and the rictus of agony is not so very great, particularly when smudged by a storm of tears. ‘I’m sorry, it’s wicked of me to be so happy but it’s only because it’s not Emily. Not because of this poor girl here. Yes, I do know who she is.’

Bob was on the phone to the police when the door bell rang. The duty sergeant at the other end was being oddly obtuse, as though he couldn’t fully take in what Bob was saying.

‘Look, it’s important, I want you to tell Inspector Bateson as soon as he gets in. The sooner he gets on to it, the sooner we’ll get my daughter home. And she may be hurt.’