Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

“Yes, Dad, and he’s off the leash ,” Ellen yells back.

“Fuck. Oops, I mean, damn! Fiver in the swear box. No, make that fifty quid, since I keep reoffending. His leash is still attached to his harness—he must have wriggled out of the damn thing. It’s too big for him. We need a smaller size.”

“I said that. You bought one for a medium dog.”

“It was the only one Pet Guff had.” That’s what Alex thinks the pet accessories superstore ought to be called. He’s leading by example.

He appears in the bedroom. “Hello, Figgs, you old Houdini, you. Where’s El?”

I didn’t notice that she’d left the room. “She was here a minute ago,” I say.

“Bedroom!” she calls out, before slamming her door shut.

“Yes!” I say.

“Yes what?” asks Alex.

“I was right. Anne Donbavand is Lisette Ingrey.”

I must hang on to this certainty. Mustn’t let doubt creep in. What’s just happened—Ellen leaving the room without a word—that’s conclusive.

So why couldn’t Ops find any hint of a murdered sister? Did he make a mistake? Is it not true that Anne grew up in an ordinary home, with her parents and one younger sister?

The Offords. And Sarah Parsons.

They’re who I need to talk to next. If I want to be really sure.

Chapter 11

An Unlocked-House Mystery

All the people gathered in Speedwell House’s drawing room listened and hardly dared to breathe as the policeman who had gone upstairs with Bascom and Sorrel told what had happened from his point of view. He had led the way upstairs, with Bascom and Sorrel following behind him. When they had reached Perrine’s bedroom door, the policeman had held out his hand for the key, and Sorrel had passed it to him. “Be careful,” she warned. “Perrine might go for you.”

“Oh, I think I can fend off a teenage girl,” said the policeman.

He unlocked the door and walked into the room. “Where is she?” he asked. “This had better not be some sort of prank.”

On hearing this, Bascom and Sorrel rushed into their youngest daughter’s bedroom. Perrine was not there. Even more peculiarly, her bed was not there either.

“She must be hiding,” said Bascom.

“Where?” said Sorrel. “There’s no wardrobe in here, only a chest of small drawers—all too small for her to fit in.”

Bascom, Sorrel and the policeman searched the room. Perrine was nowhere to be found. Her bed was nowhere to be found.

“What about that little green door in the wall?” said the policeman. “Might she have . . . ?”

“No,” said Sorrel. “Absolutely not. You open it and see if you can get out. You can’t. We pushed a very heavy mahogany wardrobe up against the wall on the landing on the other side.

“But . . . she must have escaped that way,” said Bascom, his voice brimming with bewilderment. “The only other way out of the room is by the main door, which, as you saw, was locked.”

“The window was locked too,” said Sorrel, who kept turning around suddenly, as if she expected someone dangerous to sneak up on her. “She must still be in this room, but where? She can’t be hiding under the bed because there is no bed!”

“Let’s not get carried away until we’ve checked all available avenues,” said the policeman. “I think your husband must be right, Mrs. Ingrey. The little green door seems to be the only possibility. I’ll wager that if I were to open it now, I’d see the back of the wardrobe you mentioned, with a large hole cut in it—a hole big enough to allow Perrine to escape.”

He pulled the tiny door open, and saw straightaway that he was wrong. There was unbroken solid wood pushed right up against the doorway. No hole. “Perhaps she pushed the wardrobe out of the way, climbed out, then replaced it.”

“Try it,” Sorrel suggested.

The policeman pushed and puffed and panted, but the wardrobe did not budge one millimeter (or one inch, as people used to say in the old days).

“See?” said Sorrel. “You’re a big burly man and you can’t shift it. How could Perrine? She’s a slender teenage girl.”

“So then we searched the bedroom again, every nook and cranny,” the policeman told everybody in the drawing room. “And we found neither Perrine nor her bed.”

The Dodds and the Butchers looked furious, especially the women. “So, what, she’s run off somewhere?” snapped Mrs. Dodd. “If you police let her get away with what she’s done, I’ll make your lives a misery, you mark my words!”

“There must be justice!” declared Mrs. Butcher.

Jack Kirbyshire’s widow burst into tears. “I can’t bear the thought of someone else being murdered like my poor Jack,” she sobbed.

“Never mind your grief and your desire for justice,” said Sorrel in a commanding tone. “Let us first focus on the practical side of things. It is not possible that Perrine escaped from her bedroom. It is utterly impossible, I tell you, unless one of you let her out!”

“One of us ?” said Mr. Careless, Mimsie Careless’s father. “Oh, I see! You mean me, don’t you? You’re accusing me of letting a murderer loose on the world!”

“No one’s accused you, sir,” said the policeman. “And I have to say that you’re behaving rather suspiciously.”

“No one’s accused me yet ,” said Mr. Careless, “but they soon will, you’ll see. Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through life with the name Careless? The instant something goes wrong and there’s no one else obviously to blame, even your best friends start to think, ‘Well, what about that Careless chap? Careless by name, careless by nature, no smoke without fire . . .’ ”

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Careless said, blushing. “My husband has the most enormous chip on his shoulder about his surname. Whereas I rather like it. My maiden name was a horrendous double-barreler. You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you: Common-Dowd. Can you imagine ?”

“I don’t give two hoots about your stupid husband and his stupid name!” wailed Sorrel. “Where is my Perrine? I can’t bear this! I have to know where she is! I need to know she’s safe! One of you has sneaked her out of this house when I wasn’t looking, and you’re planning to torture and kill her! Oh, why was I foolish enough to let you all in?”

Bascom patted her and did his best to calm her down. Once her hysterical fit had subsided, the policeman took over the proceedings. “Now listen, everyone,” he said. “This is very simple. Well, actually, it is very puzzling, and finding the solution will not be easy at all, but what I mean to say is that the puzzle is simple to explain. What we have here might seem to be a locked-room mystery—how does a child disappear from a room when to do so is impossible in every practical and scientific sense?—but in fact it is not a locked-room mystery!”

“It isn’t?” said Lisette, who thought that it clearly was.

“No,” said the policeman. “Because that part is simple: someone unlocked Perrine’s bedroom door and took Perrine and her bed. Having removed them from the room, this person then locked the door again. We know that must have happened, because it’s the only thing that could have happened. Now, let me show you what I found on Perrine’s bedroom floor.” He rummaged in his pocket and produced something so small that no one could see it. “A small metal screw,” he said. “This strongly suggests that whoever removed Perrine’s bed from the room took it apart first. Of course, it is much easier to remove a bed in the form of discrete pieces of wood than as a whole bed, so dismantling the bed would make sense.”