appreciative if you could tell me what your concern is, Inspector Priest.'
'Right,' I told him. 'First of all can I say thanks for ringing, Agent Kaprowski. Do I, er, have to keep calling you Agent Kaprowski? I answer to Charlie.'
'Pleased to have your acquaintance, Charlie. I'm Mike.'
'That's better. OK, Mike, here we go.' I told him briefly about the fire and Melissa's possible involvement. I made it vague and general, and said we thought there might have been a political motive. I suggested that it gave us a window on to a much bigger picture, but at the moment it was dark out there. He made uh-uh noises at appropriate intervals. I finished by asking why the FBI had a file on her.
'Routine,' he replied. 'It was opened in '73 when she came to UCLA, presumably because of her drugs conviction. They were heady days back then, and all sorts of cuckoos were coming in and causing trouble. Miss Youngman, it says here, had friends in Paris who were believed to be attached to the Red Brigade. They were a bunch o' left-wing loonies based in Italy. She left the US a year later, re-entered in 1989 and immediately made contact with a militia group in Tennessee. That's about the size of it. Did you say this fire was back in '75?'
'Yes.'
'Gee! Don't you guys ever give up?'
'Just catching up with my workload, Mike. I thought these militia groups you have were right-wing.'
'Right-wing, left-wing, what's the difference? Do you subscribe to the theory that the world is round, Charlie?'
'Er, yes.'
'That's a concept that a farm boy from Iowa like me has difficulty grappling with. Apparently if you walk far enough in one direction you'll find yourself coming back the other way. It's just the same with these groups; they all widdle in the same creek. If the guns are big enough and it messes with the government, they'll join.'
'I get the message. Do you know where she is now?'
'Youngman? No, but I reckon we could find her without breaking a sweat. You want her back?'
'I'm not sure. We might one day, but at the moment we're only gathering background, acquaintances, you know the thing.'
'Well, just let me know if you do, and I'll put her on the next plane with a liddle label around her neck.'
'She sounds a delightful lady, I can hardly wait. Thanks for your help, Mike, and I'll be in touch.'
'My pleasure, Charlie. Adios.'
'Adios.'
Adios. I liked that. I replaced the phone and said it again. 'Adios.
Adios. Adios, amigo.' So Melissa was in America, running through the woods with a bunch of rednecks whose wives had backsides bigger than their pickups and whose idea of entertainment was arm-wrestling with a bear. Should be right up the street of an ex-head girl of Beverley Cathedral Grammar School, I thought.
Chapter 8
The anti cyclone re-established itself over the Bay of Biscay, pushing the threat of unsettled weather back over Russia, where it belonged.
Dave finished his painting, the M62 was closed for two hours by grass fires, and I mowed my lawn. A judicious grass fire would have saved me the bother. Once again the bright tables and umbrellas sprang up all over the precinct, like toadstools in a book of fairy stories, and commerce slowed to a standstill. Crime didn't. Lust is mercury-filled; it rises and falls with temperature. Hot afternoons, scant clothing, walks in the meadows; it's a potent mixture. Add lunchtime drinking outside the pub with the new girl from Telesales and you have all the ingredients for rape, and we had several. Not by the inadequate loner, waiting for a victim, any victim, and striking violently. These were between semi-consenting couples who were carried away by the moment. Two of them were mothers complaining about the boys next door and their daughters, and one housewife thought that inviting the builder in for a beer was normal behaviour, even if she was wearing a bikini and had spent all morning sunbathing topless. We had a rubber stamp made that said: 'She was asking for it,' to speed up the statements.
The druggies changed their modus operandi, too. Open windows facilitated the taking of tellies and videos, but demand was down.
Garden tools, barbecue furniture and big chimney pots, plants for growing in, became the new currency. It added some variety to the job and the wooden tops had to learn how to spell some new words.
'Ta-da!' Dave fan fared as he came into my office on Wednesday morning, his smile broader than a seaside comedian's lapels.
'What?' I said, lifting the pile of papers in my in-tray and sliding the request for next year's budget underneath.
He sat down and grinned at me.
'Go on,' I invited, 'or is that it?'
'That Piers Forrester is a really nice bloke,' he told me.
'He's a supercilious twat,' I replied.
'He's been very helpful.'
'He wears a dickie bow.'
'Oh, so he's a supercilious twat because he wears a dickie bow, is he?'
'Yes.'
'And Graham's OK, too.'
'He's all right, I suppose.'
'Because he doesn't wear a dickie bow?'
'He wears Yves St. Laurent short-sleeved shirts. That must say something about him.'
'Like what?'
'I don't know. You're the detective, I'm just the office boy. What have you found out?'
'Right,' he replied, eagerly. 'We've cracked it.'
'Go on.'
'Melissa went to grammar school in Beverley, didn't she?'
'Yep.'
'And then on to Essex University.'
'Mmm.'
'So Graham has paid them a visit to have a look at her classmates there, like I did for Duncan in Leeds. And guess what?'
'I'm all ears.'
'There was another girl enrolled there at the same time, from the same school in Beverley. She was called Janet Wilson. She's bound to have been in the same class as MeliSSa, don't you think? She must know her.'
I let my glum look slip, but only briefly. 'What do you mean by was called Janet Wilson?' I asked.
'She's married, that's all. She's now called Janet Holmes, and lives at the Coppice, Bishop's Court, York. We could be there in an hour.'
You can learn a lot about a person from the pictures they have on their wall. This one was a tinted drawing, larger than average, of a circular construction. It looked Moorish at first glance, and I expected it to be called something like jn the Courtyard of the Alhambra, but when I looked closer I realised it was biological. What I'd taken as tiles or pieces of mosaic were individual cells.
'Do you like it?' Mrs. Holmes asked as she came into the room, carrying a tray.
'It's not what it seems,' I replied, 'and that intrigues me. It's also very attractive.'
'Your sergeant's call certainly intrigued me,' she replied. 'Please, sit down.'
'Constable,' Dave corrected.
There was a caption and a signature under the picture. They read:
Ascaris lumbricoides and J. Holmes. I said: 'Did you do this, Mrs.
Holmes?' sounding impressed.
'It's what I do for a living,' she answered. 'I'm a technical illustrator. I took a few liberties with the colour on
