Sergeant brightly, hoping to lighten the mood, ‘what did I miss?’
‘Just under three years ago,’ began Grey, ‘Chad here was a witness in the disappearance of Isobel Semple.’
‘She was here on the last night anyone saw her,’ added Chad of his own validation.
‘I don’t know if you ever saw the file, Cori..?’
She hadn’t, but like everyone in town, police or otherwise, she had known the case inside out; and though it had been a while since it had been a day to day occurrence to hear some snippet of news or new rumour about her vanishing, it did not take very long for the details to flood back.
‘You’ll recall,’ continued Grey, ‘that there was a lad she knew, a boyfriend, or at least a male acquaintance — they were reported as been often seen around together. He’d be in here at times too, wouldn’t he?’
Chad nodded.
‘Well, we never found him, he never came forward, and he wasn’t seen in town again from that day on; the day Isobel left that letter with her friend to give to her mother, telling her she was leaving.’
‘And he was a strange lad,’ Chad took up the narrative, ‘just a little kid, but wired, you know? Like only he knew that he was the centre of something really important. Came from an unhappy home, I always thought. I felt nothing for him — he was only here because she was, and I liked her. But when it came to the crunch, and the Inspector asked us, well… none of us knew anything about him.’
‘Over-and-over,’ explained Grey, ‘her friends, and the customers here, and anyone else who’d seen him around town, described him as being sallow, whey-faced, as indistinct a figure as you could hope to see. Well, we can see that for ourselves now. I mean,’ he held the image up on his mobile phone touchscreen for all to see, ‘how would you go about instructing someone to construct a photofit of that? I mean, even his own mother would have difficulty describing him to a stranger. And that was all part of the deal, because there was not one distinctive or identifying mark upon him, and yet…’
‘And yet,’ Chad took over, ‘the only name any of us ever had for him was Scar, like that blinking lion in the film! He’d be sitting here, with a few others of us maybe, not ever saying much I remember, just whispering in Isi’s ear or sharing some private joke with her — they used to burst into laughter at the same things, or where no one else in the room knew what the joke was! — and then his phone would go off, and he’d jump up and be on the pavement outside talking loudly to whoever it was, and he’d be all, “This is Scar, it’s the Scar Man, what’s up?” All that street talk, you know?’
‘In short he was an idiot,’ Grey clarified to no one’s benefit.
‘Now, I looked, and I never saw a scar on him anywhere, and nor did anyone else. And now you tell me his name was S Carman? So how did you find him?’ asked Chad after a pause.
‘He’s turned up in another enquiry. We can’t take too much credit,’ answered Grey modestly.
‘Drugs is it? Oh, I appreciate you can’t tell me. But I bet it is.’
‘We can’t say.’
‘I sometimes thought they were taking something together, she used to come in glassy-eyed at times, dazed. Of course they were young — they drank, they took things, I don’t know. She used to hang out here a lot at the shop, after school or when she didn’t want to go home. She never bought anything, she didn’t have any money! I don’t know if she even really liked music that much. Perhaps here was the only place she didn’t get kicked out of? She used to let me play whatever I liked, and she’d sit down here with a sausage roll or can of Coke or whatever she’d lifted from wherever; I don’t think she ever had a meal at home. God, she hated her mum…’
Cori, holding her tea and with her back to the shop window, looked up at the posters above the men’s heads, images of bands and records and concerts: one in particular caught her eye, of a baby swimming after a dollar bill dangled from a fishing line, which seemed to say something profound about society, but she wasn’t sure exactly what; another simply showed two sleek greyhounds tearing around the corner of a racetrack, sand thrown up from their feet, their faces contorted in what could have been glee, but which could equally have been the panic and fury of those competing in the rat race. Much more comforting was the only one that she, never an avid record buyer, recognised: that of the brass band in bright tunics, stood before flowerbeds and backed by their heroes cast in wax like a gallery at Madam Tussauds. But she wasn’t to be allowed even this one comforting image,
‘It’s a funeral, you know,’ said Chad, breaking from his narrative upon seeing the focus of her attention, ‘or so they say.’
‘No it’s not,’ answered Cori, ‘it’s a band playing in the park. My mum had that album. She used to play it me as a girl.’ She found herself becoming irrationally upset at his callous dispelling of her childhood memory.
‘Of course it is. It’s full of sadness — you’ve just got to see the signs. I mean, half the people standing behind them were dead even when they made the album; and look at this four, the band’s own waxworks, standing to one side, dressed in black; look at the sadness on that one face there.’ He pointed at a young mopheaded man, who upon inspection did look fit to flood with waxwork tears.
‘So who is he mourning for?’
‘Who knows? Perhaps his own past, the world they left behind? Your guess is as good as mine. There are theories of course.’
‘I suppose you don’t see these things when you’re a kid,’ she said resignedly, determined not to let him know how irked his clever-dick attitude had left her. But on with the investigation, and having the blanks filled in by two men more than happy to spend an hour wallowing again in the mystery of Isobel Semple,
‘Of course, it was never strictly a police matter, never a crime even.’ Grey was doing most of the talking now, Chad offering colour commentary, a detail or two when the spirit took him. Cori thought how desperately sad Chad looked as the Inspector told the tale. ‘She left a letter; she told friends she was going; there was no hint of wrongdoing… and had she been only a couple of weeks older we wouldn’t even have opened a file on her.’
‘But she was only seventeen…’
‘The parents were soon in touch, and we wanted to help them, if only to find their daughter and arrange a phone call home. She was still technically a child. And of course,’ continued Grey, ‘we thought it would be easier, that she’d turn up in days, that she’d check into a hostel or get picked up on the streets. We couldn’t know then that we would find nothing, that she could just… vanish. A cliche I know, but there you go — she just went.
‘And then the paper started up its campaigning… This was during that bloody awful winter we had. I think in people’s minds they thought she was out there in the snow somewhere, lost and cold. And then those little blue flowers came out, and the paper started calling her Southney’s Snowdrop. And how could we give up then, once the town was mobilised and parents were petitioning, and the school-kids were being told about her in assembly, and the local press were asking at the station every day?’
‘And her mum gave them that photo of her when she was fifteen,’ recalled Chad, ‘all smiling and angelic, and before she’d got the purple streaks in her hair and her lip pierced.’
‘And I think from that day on that image of her was fixed firmly in the public’s consciousness of that being her when she vanished, even if it gave her age as seventeen right beside the picture on the page.’
‘She was a student, wasn’t she?’ asked Cori.
‘Yes, at the sixth form college; although only nominally so judging by her recent reports. The teachers told us it happened a lot with kids from her background: she had grown up in Henthills, although her parents had since moved the family out a bit towards the suburbs.
‘Not the best start.’
‘No, not our town’s most salubrious district.’
‘And so did anything happen on the day she left?’
The Inspector’s beguiled expression suggested not, ‘On that day, the tenth of January, getting on for three years ago now, she was here with her friends, as was often the case, before… well, ask your man here.’
‘Yes,’ started Chad, ‘she was hanging about, not buying anything as usual. She was with her mate Connie. I was stacking at the other end of the shop. I think she’d been asking me to give her a job — she was always doing that. I said, as I always did, “So, it isn’t enough that I let you hang around here for free, you actually want paying for it?” And she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, ‘cos I’m leaving anyway,” and then she went into a sulk. She knew I was joking, we never properly argued.’
‘Tell her about the letter.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The younger man, duly prompted, began, ‘Well, I must have been in and out of the storeroom as I missed the girls arguing at first. They were fine one minute, and then before I knew it they were screaming at one another — you know how teenagers can get, they’re so passionate about everything, always quarrelling. I thought,
