I went up to Gilbert's office and had a coffee with him. "Strong, black and preferably with caffeine," I requested.
"Coming up. Would you like a tot of something stronger in it?"
"No thanks. Did you ring Annabelle?"
He placed the coffees on two mats on his table. "Yes, she said she understood. She'll realise what it's all about when she reads the papers." He dunked a digestive biscuit and manoeuvred the soggy mass into his mouth just before it collapsed.
"That's a disgusting habit," I protested.
"One of life's little comforts, Charlie. Help yourself." He swallowed the remainder and went on: Annabelle's a nice girl. Too good for you, if the truth be known. You'll lose her if you don't watch it."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence; it's just what I need."
"No, you don't understand. It's not you, it's the job. Just look at yourself; take stock. You went to art college, got a degree in batik dyeing or something ' "It was in art."
"OK, art. You pretend to like decent music, appreciate good food. The fact that you listen to jungle drums and eat rubbish is due to circumstances. You could look reasonably tidy if you changed your clothes more often ' "I change my clothes as often as anyone," I protested.
"Well, you always look crumpled. Sometimes I don't know if you're supposed to be a Hell's Angel or an out-of-work violinist."
"I like looking crumpled. I feel comfortable when I'm crumpled. And look at yourself. You had that shirt on yesterday."
"No I didn't." It was his turn to be indignant.
"Yes you did."
He looked down at it. "Did I? Must have picked the wrong one up this morning. Blame it on the early start. Anyhow, we're not talking about me. The point I'm making is that you've some hard thinking to do.
Charlie the Artist could just about pull Annabelle. Charlie the Policeman never will. She needs more than you can give her as you are at present, but she's worth the effort. If I were you, I'd make it."
I hadn't a clue what he was talking about. "Are you telling me I ought to resign?" I asked, incredulously.
He shook his head. "No, of course not." He dunked another biscuit.
"But outside that door all hell's breaking loose, and I'm in here trying to sort out your love life. Last night, if I'd been in your shoes, I'd have gone round to Annabelle's for supper."
I stared at him for several seconds. "No you wouldn't," I declared.
"Yes I would, if I wanted her."
"I don't believe you. I don't believe you and I think you're wrong."
"Maybe, maybe not. Now, what are we doing about finding this kid?"
I left Gilbert concocting a speech for the television cameras and drove round to see Mr. Dewhurst. A patrol car was parked in the lane. I pulled in behind it and had a word with the driver:
"Is he in?"
"Yes, sir."
"Any problems with the press or passing ghouls?"
"No, but it suddenly seems a popular road for dog-walkers to use."
"Does it? Is anybody talking to them?"
"Yes, sir, we are. Most of them say they didn 't come this way yesterday, but the few who did didn't see anything."
"Fair enough. Keep at it."
There was a Toyota Supra parked on the drive as well as the Nissan. The registration plate bore Dewhurst's initials, MJD. Personal number plates should be compulsory they are a lot easier to remember. I glanced round the garden at nothing in particular, then pressed the bell push. I was just considering whether it would be polite to ring again when the door was opened by an elderly lady. I fished in my pocket for my ID card.
"Good morning, I'm Inspector Priest. Is Mr. Dewhurst available?"
"Have you found her?" she demanded, and for a brief moment her face lit up with hope.
I shook my head. "No, I'm sorry, we've no news yet. You must be…?"
"Mrs. Eaglin. Georgina's grandma." Her face sagged back to the hopeless expression it had borne a moment earlier. "You'd better come in." She took me through to the sitting room and invited me to sit down. "Miles is asleep," she told me. "We waited up until about four o'clock this morning and then I insisted that he take one of my pills.
Do you want me to wake him?"
"No, I'll catch him later. If we have no success today we're thinking about making a television appeal tomorrow morning. We'd need Mr.
Dewhurst down at the station at about nine thirty, if he agrees to it.
Sometimes they produce good results. I'd be grateful if you could forewarn him."
"What do you think's happened to her, Inspector? She's such a lovely girl…" Mrs. Eaglin's eyes filled with tears and she sniffed into a tiny lace handkerchief. Her fingers were clenched as tightly as the arthritis would allow.
When she'd composed herself I said: "We're hoping that Georgina played truant from school and became too frightened to come home; or maybe she got lost. We're talking to any other children who were absent on Monday. Alternatively, she may have been abducted by, say, a childless woman who wants her for her own daughter. That happens more often than you'd realise."
I didn't mention that we were dragging the canal, and that the helicopter was scouring the fields and woods with the latest heat-seeking technology. We also had a long print-out of sex offenders, and were slowly working our way through it. Silly men who'd led blameless lives after flashing in the park thirty years ago were having their pasts raked up in front of their families. It hardly seemed fair, but we were grasping at the wind.
"Mrs. Eaglin, how did Georgina seem when you last saw her?" I asked.
She lowered the hanky and thought for a few seconds. "Perfectly normal. In fact she was looking forward to going to school because they were rehearsing for the end-of-term play."
"Was she in it?" I enquired.
A smile briefly made an appearance, then fled. "No, but it disrupted lessons. I think that's what she liked it for."
"When did you see her?"
"Over the weekend. Miles picks me up Friday evening, straight after collecting Georgina from the child minder. He works Saturdays and likes to have a game of golf on Sunday. My husband, George, died nearly seven years ago, so I love to come here and look after Georgina.
I sometimes visit through the week, too, especially when Miles has to stay away overnight."
"And when did you go home?"
"Sunday evening, about seven. They both took me. After dropping me off I believe they were going for a pizza. Not really my cup of tea, and far too late for Georgina, but I'm old-fashioned."
I declined a drink and left after proffering more empty reassurances.
It's a thin line between false hopes and premature gloom. As long as we didn't know, we had to assume she was still alive. Any other attitude was pointless.
On the way back to the station I had a flash of inspiration, so I went via St. Bidulph's on the Top Road. Annabelle lives in the Old Vicarage, near the church. In the door pocket of the car was a bottle of claret, and the back seat held a rapidly fading bunch of salmon-pink roses. I stood on her doorstep, bottle in one hand and wilting blooms in the other, rehearsing my lines: "Sorry I'm late, I was held up."
But she wasn't in.
Wednesday morning we filmed the TV appeal. The crew set up their cameras and lights in the conference room and the producer went through the scripts with Gilbert and myself. Gilbert introduced me as Acting Chief Inspector Priest.
"What's this Acting Chief bit?" I whispered to him at the first possible opportunity.
"It goes down better with the public," he replied in a hushed voice.
"Gives you a bit more status."
"I don't want to be Acting Chief," I hissed back.
"Well you are."
"Officially?"
"Yes."
"Paid?"
"Yes, bloody well paid."
Our whispers were growing louder and faces were turning towards us.
"Are you trying to get rid of me, Gilbert?"
The Super's face was red with frustration and he thumped a palm with a fist.
"For Christ's sake, Charlie, I thought I was doing you a favour!"
"Oh. Well, thanks."
I liked being the longest-ever-serving inspector. I'd been as young as it was possible to be when appointed, and then made no further progress up the ladder. It was a record I was proud of. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mr. Dewhurst going into the toilets.
"Excuse me," called the producer. "We'll begin if you're all ready.
You first, Superintendent. Quiet, please."
"You're on," I said to Gilbert, adding: "You won't mind if I go to wave Willy at the wall, will you?"
In the gents', Dewhurst was standing at the washbasins, running water into one of them. He looked up as I entered and we exchanged polite but grim nods. He left as I was having my pee. I washed my hands in the sink next to the one he'd used and followed him out.
There was another delay for some reason. Mrs. Eaglin was standing with Dewhurst, giving him support before his ordeal by television. He had the worst part of all. Eventually they were ready and the producer called for Gilbert again. As he was leaving me I told him: "Your hair's sticking up at the back, Gilbert."
He gave it a perfunctory wipe with his hand.
"No," I said, 'it's still sticking up. You ought to comb it."
"Bloody hell, Charlie!" he hissed at me. "It's not a frigging game show. What's got into you?"
Gilbert had one minute to tell the story so far; then Dewhurst did his bit. It was harrowing. He broke down and wept and couldn't finish off what he wanted to say. Nearly everybody in the room was crying with him, some openly, some internally. Then I had to go on and tell people where to come with their information. I don't envy news readers I felt shagged-out when it was over.
The film was shown locally on the lunchtime news, and broadcast nationally in the evening. The response was phenomenal. We imported extra staff to man the computers. Over the next three weeks every single lead was followed, and every one of them took us up a dead end.
Georgina Dewhurst had vanished from the face of the globe as effectively as if she had never existed.
We checked over three hundred alibis and made thirty-one arrests. Of these, only two reached the 'helping us with our enquiries' stage.
"Georgina Man Detained' screamed the headlines in the tabloids. We were only going through the motions, though. The first was Billy Sunshine. Billy stands just outside the bus station most days, rocking gently backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. He usually has a bottle sticking out of his jacket pocket and a big smile for everyone who passes by. There had been one report of a little girl being seen hand-in-hand with a man heading away from the area. A scruffy man it could have been Billy. He'd been shown the photo on the Tuesday morning and said he recognised her. We kept him in overnight and gave him breakfast. He had a better alibi than Nixon when Kennedy was shot, so we handed him over to the detox centre.
The other one was more like it. It wasn't as a result of fine detective work someone wrote us an anonymous letter. Terry Finnister lived in Workington, but had delivered a lorry load of bathroom equipment to a company in Heckley early that Monday morning. And, the letter-writer kindly advised us, he was a convicted sex offender. They went on to give us some advice on how to treat his sort. I took Nigel to Workington to have a word with him, and we brought him back to Heckley.
It was a mess. When he'd been a teenager his mother had remarried. Her new husband had a young son. Finnister served five years for buggering the child while baby-sitting. During the interview he told us that his stepfather had raped him, and that his mother had died of an overdose while he was in jail. At the time of Georgina's disappearance he'd been off-loading two dozen avocado, low-level, easy-flush toilet pedestals, and he had the invoices to prove it; plus a receipt for his breakfast, eaten shortly afterwards. We asked the local SOCO to give the cab of his lorry a going-over, but we lacked enthusiasm.
The Reverend Gerry Wilde, vicar of St. Peter and St. Paul's, was annoyed; or as annoyed as he ever allowed himself to become. His hatchback crested the brow in the road where he gained his first view of St. Peter and St. Paul's. He always looked forward to that dramatic moment. First the trees loomed up out of the ground, then they appeared to swing to one side as the road curved, revealing the majestic prospect of his church. Normally, the Union flag, taut in the stiff breeze, would have added an extra fris son of delight. The Reverend Wilde was firstly a man of God, and secondly a patriot. Not that he would have separated them in that way.
For him, the two conditions were so tightly intertwined that he could not understand how anyone could claim to be one without the other.
Certainly not if one was an Englishman. But today the flag was an aberration. Three times he'd told Joseph, the verger, to take it down; and there it still was, four days after Coronation Day, proclaiming heaven-knows-what to the parish. Soon it would have to go up again for the Duke of Edinburgh's birthday, but it made a mockery of his efforts if the two events ran together.
He put the car in its garage alongside the vicarage. He'd have to have a word with Joseph be more firm with him. He hated any form of unpleasantness, though. And, of course, Joseph had worshipped here all his life, whereas he was a newcomer, relatively speaking.
No, he'd teach by example. Jesus washed His disciples' feet; he, Gerry Wilde, would strike the flag. Then he would leave it for Joseph to put away. Maybe that would impress upon the old man that he meant what he said. He took his tower key from its hook in the kitchen and set off across the graveyard to the church.
In the ringing chamber the six hemp ropes, with their coloured sallies, hung through the guides in the ceiling. The vicar noted that one rope was shorter than the others. That meant that the big tenor bell was in the vertical position, on the backstroke, ready to be set swinging with the minimum of effort at the next bell-ringing session. He locked the chamber door behind him and put the key in his pocket. If he was going up the tower he didn't want anybody touching the ropes. One ton of bell was poised to fall he didn't want it falling on him.
He was puffing like an asthmatic tuba player when he reached the belfry, and the pain in his chest had returned. Fortunately it was the wrong side for his heart. There was a walkway skirting the bells, with a handrail for extra safety. Nevertheless he kept a wary eye on the inverted tenor as he made his way to the bottom of the wooden ladder that led the last few feet up on to the roof.
The bolt in the trap door slid back easily, and a moment later the Reverend was outside, on the roof of his tower. He'd only been up here a couple of times before. The noise was deafening. What had been a moderate breeze at ground level was a gale at this height. The flag material was slapping and cracking with a ferocity that seemed as if it would rip to shreds, and the ropes were lashing against the mast. First of all he wanted to admire the view. He'd heard that you could see Lincoln Cathedral from up here. He peered in the right direction in vain. A few degrees to the left the columns of steam from the Trent Valley power stations were plainly visible.
"Twentieth-century cathedrals," said the vicar with distaste, and started pulling on the rope.
He untied the flag and bundled into his arms it was impossible to fold in the swirling wind. As he was walking towards the trapdoor a wayward corner flapped up across his face. He pulled it away with his hand, but this allowed another fold of material to fall to the floor. The Reverend Wilde's right foot stepped on it and his left one became tangled in the beloved flag. He fell headlong into the open trap. His arms were enmeshed, so he could not use them to halt his progress, and he shot head first down the wooden steps, like a tobogganist down the Cresta run. Had there been anybody else in the church they would have heard the crack of his neck snapping as he hit the bottom, but there wasn't.