with cash.’
‘So, you must get a lot of information from that phone?’ supposed Grey.
‘Well, it turns out Carman’s not quite such an idiot after all: for a lot of his work calls he uses throwaway mobiles, twenty quid jobs. He changes them too quickly for us to get much of a trace on them. He often leaves the smart phone with Isi when he’s out on business. So you see, for our part, we didn’t know that the Havahostel call held any great significance; more likely it was a personal call for her. But it always pays to check.
‘Anyhow, I can see we’ve all got a lot to chew over.’ Nash began the winding up. ‘And you’ll want to get up here and take a look at what your girl’s been doing for these last three years? As I say, I can’t let you approach her; but I’ll see what there is in the file I can show you. We work all hours, so the sooner the better really.’
‘I think this evening would suit the Inspector,’ Rose startled them to announce.
‘Well, we’re out in the field a fair bit just at the minute — incommunicado, you know — but I will be around till late today catching up on paperwork. If that suits?’
‘That’s fine,’ answered Rose. Grey looked at Cori, who nodded.
‘Great. You could be back home by ten. I’ll have someone meet you at the station.’
‘I’ll think it will be easier to drive up,’ Grey considered.
‘That’s fine. Just come into the main reception and ask for me.’ And with that the Nottingham officer rang off to resume his undercover operations.
The three sat awhile digesting the news, Grey speaking first,
‘Of all the things I thought might have happened to her — accident, running away, hidden secrets, even falling victim to someone or something, even murder — never did the possibility occur to me that she may have been purposefully hiding out… and quite happily so it seems.’
‘We don’t know that she was happy about it,’ Cori corrected him, her voice brimming with sympathy for the girl, ‘We can’t imagine what she was going through.’
‘But we know now that she must have been aware of the media coverage, saw her mother’s crying face in the papers. I can still see the headlines now: Mother pleads for “Snowdrop” to come home. And for what though? Deference to some scumbag boyfriend wanting to keep his dirty street deals secret, not wanting anyone to know where the two of them went?’
‘It is extraordinary,’ added the Superintendent, stunned out of his usual bulldog bluster by these developments, at least temporarily, ‘that she has been so close, so visible…’
‘But we don’t know what kind of life she’s been living.’ This was Cori again, feeling herself the found girl’s spokeswoman in answering the men’s speculations.
‘But at the very least she has been living, able to hear and see. What am I trying to say here?’ The Super was lost for the right form of words.
Grey had a go at helping him out, ‘Perhaps we have all had the impression, or misapprehension, that through being far away from here, or insensible or unaware through whatever ill influence I daren’t hardly care to speculate on, she might have been… unreachable somehow. That we now learn she seems to have been living an at least semi-normal life, and not very far away… well, it will take some time to adjust our impressions.’
What was it, Cornelia wondered, with these men that made them a sentimental mess at the very thought of this girl Isobel Semple? At first she wondered if it was simply that they had lived through this case from the start, had known the parents at the worst times, and now were having to contemplate the case’s completion. Yet it wasn’t as though this was the only sad tale either of them had ever come across in their police careers, and she couldn’t imagine they might fall into such maudlin reflection every time a person vanished or a family were parted.
Then she wondered if it might have been the air of mystery the affair had generated, the way it had gripped the town in speculation, and their deflation at now having to accept the facts were so much more prosaic?
But she settled instead on the notion that this physically small, and still quite young woman in danger evoked their paternalistic instincts; which, while they would work just as hard to find her as they would a person of any age or gender, left them at the same time in such a heightened emotionally state.
She pondered whether this sentimentally, albeit with noble intentions, could be felt in quite the same way by a woman, or by either sex for a missing man; and came to the calm conclusion that it wouldn’t, not in quite the same way. Fathers and daughters eh, she mused, as her thoughts returned to the tasks in hand.
‘Yes,’ concurred the Super upon hearing Grey’s assessment, ‘whatever our thoughts about Isobel, we know she is safe now, or as safe as we can make her, and under Nash’s surveillance. But are we any closer finding Thomas Long? Do we have the first idea of where he is, or what he might be up to?’
Grey knew any answer he could give would be speculative; so it was just as well the Superintendent was only asking rhetorically, he resuming,
‘That’s why I’m sending you there this evening. I want this one to be off-duty. You understand me? I’m as thrilled to hear of Isobel’s safety as the next man; but it is not our active investigation, and I’m not going to let people say we’ve put Thomas on the back-burner so we can go chasing off after that girl again. You go up to Nottingham this evening. Confirm it’s her, get it out of our systems, and then that is that until the Long case is concluded.
‘So sum up for me: is there the slightest link between the two enquiries?’
Grey struggled to come up with any but the most obvious connections, ‘Both their fathers worked at Aubrey’s; both attended the same school, but in different years, though Thomas and Carman’s years would be closer.’
‘And what about at the Havahostel?’
‘Only that the call was made that morning, and Thomas seen there that evening.’
‘Quite a gap though…’
‘Well, we don’t know when Smith was there till — they could easily have been in the room still at seven pm.’
‘So do we know when Smith checked in, checked out? Do we know anything about them?’
‘Well, the receptionist will be back first thing…’
‘You know, I’m not sure you’ve handled the hotel angle at all well.’
‘Sir, we leant quite a bit from…’
‘It sounds like you were only there ten minutes.’
‘Well the phones were ringing when we left here; we hoped there’d be other leads waiting to be chased…’
‘You didn’t speak to anyone else at the scene, anyone who might have seen him.’
‘There’s someone doing that right now.’
‘Either way, I want you back up there before you leave for Nottingham.’
‘We have learnt some new facts though, sir,’ Grey pleaded in mitigation. ‘We know it’s likely Smith was calling Isobel and not Carman.’
‘But that still has nothing to do with Thomas Long! We really have no other leads on him after the hotel sighting?’
‘No, sir. And Sarah would have interrupted us if anything had come in while we’ve been here speaking.’
‘So where did Thomas go? Use your experience, break it down for me.’
‘My best guess?’ Grey hated having to speculate so openly. ‘Well, the sightings we have point to someone waiting at a different busstop than usual after work, and from there heading directly to the services; where, and here we must be judicious, he appeared to be waiting for someone, to have an appointment to keep with whoever owned that distinctive, possibly an older, car he was seen standing by — there really seems no other reason for him to be stood where he was. Now, in any other case…’
‘You would think he had planned to meet someone and go away with them?’
‘But not Thomas. I don’t believe that is how his mind works. He is inward-looking, not outward. I think he would believe his problems, if they could be solved at all, would be solved by his family and close colleagues, here in town: his mother, Gail Marsh. He would turn to them, not run away.’
‘Even if his family and colleagues were the problem: this secret he was keeping from his father and the other workmen, knowing none of them would get paid? He’s hardly Cassandra, but even so, it must have been tormenting.’
‘Agreed, sir. Agreed. Yet I still don’t buy it. You asked my honest opinion, and there it is.’
