Thirty-Eight

Robert Wilde got in to work early that day.

On top of the papers on his desk was a note, saying that the car—the little snub-nosed Morris, once so much loved and cared for—now stood in the police pound waiting for the eventual sale at auction authorized by Beryl Graham.

He stopped in the act of taking off his jacket, and held the note up to the light. When he dropped his hand, he stood absolutely still, looking at the familiar landscape of the street underneath his window.

It was not yet nine o’clock. The shops were still locked, and the pedestrian walkways deserted. A postman’s bike was propped against the old milestone guarding the pedestrian crossing. A few people hurried past on their way to work.

Poor Alisha, he thought. The wayward and brilliant Miss Graham, who had climbed a good many obstacles in this life, and who had probably considered that she would have no real difficulty in conquering the disturbance of the girl she had grown to love. Wilde sighed softly. And Alisha Graham had loved this girl. Tried to answer her questions. Tried to help her. And died, it seemed, on a hill, in the dark, hundreds of miles from home.

She had died for love, he thought.

His throat constricted with sudden pity.

Every time he thought of this case, he felt frustrated and depleted. And he was still tired, today, after a night’s sleep. It had been a restless night, when he had got up three times, and found himself sitting on the edge of the bed with a sense of an unfinished dream. Words and faces evading him. Images muddled.

He looked down again at the note. The thirty-year-old Morris lay in the hastily typed words, a mute accusation. Alisha Graham stood behind the Morris—he could almost see her hand on its seat, as her hand had been lying that morning when they had found her. Upturned, as though frozen in the act of pointing something out.

I can’t help you, he thought.

I don’t know what it is that you want me to see.

The phone rang.

‘Yes … Wilde.’

It was the WPC on the front desk.

‘Chief Inspector, there’s a man to see you. Will you come down?’

‘Who is it?’

There was a pause as the woman read the name she had written down. ‘It’s a Mr McGovern,’ she said. ‘Benedict McGovern.’

He had formed a picture in his head, but the man standing before him in the interview room did not fit the picture.

He had thought that McGovern would certainly have a transparent weakness about him. He had imagined a very tall person—drawn, in his imagination, as large as Ben McGovern figured in Anna’s fears. She had said that he was dark, and she had said that he was very smooth, very polished, but he had trusted himself to recognize fallibility. And it sincerely shocked him that there was no obvious fallibility about this man. McGovern was about six foot, quietly and unspectacularly dressed, and—and this was the thing that surprised him most—with a self-effacing manner.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ was his first remark.

‘Please … sit down.’

They sat opposite each other, across a table.

‘You must be very busy,’ McGovern said.

‘Not any more so than usual.’

Ben McGovern smiled. It reached his eyes, Wilde noted.

‘I’ve come to speak to you about the woman you know as Anna Miles.’

Wilde waited, saying nothing.

‘She’s been to see you?’

‘She has, yes.’

McGovern sighed. He looked down at the table, and gave a little shake of his head. ‘Yes … I was afraid of that.’

‘Can you tell me why?’

‘Why I was afraid? Yes, certainly.’ He paused. ‘This is a little embarrassing.’

‘I promise you I’m not easily shocked.’

As he said it, Robert Wilde felt the rapid lie. Such a statement might have been true two days ago. But if he hadn’t been shocked in the house in Pennystone Road, what had he been? Running out of a house with his hands over his head. If he hadn’t been shocked by that, shocked at his own lack of resistance, the seeming ease with which he had fallen into some sort of grey area, a place where he had never been before and never wanted to go again …

Yes, he had been shocked. And it had been very easy. Like staying awake last night had been easier than to sleep.

McGovern smiled again. ‘I knew Anna a year ago,’ he said. ‘She disappeared one night, and I never knew where she had gone. I reported her missing. Her house is standing empty just as she left it. And now …’ he stopped. ‘I’ve found her here.’

‘You came looking for her,’ Wilde said.

‘Looking? No. I had no idea she was here.’

‘Then …’

‘I’m working in this area,’ McGovern said. ‘I’m working with Laura Aubrete. I’m an architect. Mrs Aubrete told me about Anna. About Matthew. Her husband.’

‘I see,’ Wilde said.

‘I spoke to Mr Aubrete yesterday.’ McGovern stopped, evidently expecting a response. ‘At the Manor. About the will.’

Robert Wilde hid his surprise. ‘They’ve been very frank with you,’ he said.

‘Oh, it isn’t a matter of them being very frank,’ McGovern replied. ‘It’s a matter of all three of us being subjected to deceit.’

‘Oh?’ Wilde asked.

‘Deceit and fraud.’

‘You’re alleging fraud?’

‘I would if I could prove it,’ McGovern said.

‘Fraud on yourself, do you mean?’

‘Absolutely. That’s absolutely what I mean.’

‘By Anna Miles?’

‘Anna Cray. Yes.’

Wilde looked at him carefully. There was nothing but an earnest anxiety in the man’s expression. ‘Are you here to press charges?’ he asked.

McGovern laughed softly. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Anna took money from me, but I can’t prove that I didn’t give it to her willingly. In fact,’ he added, ‘in a manner of speaking, I did give it to her willingly. She asked me for a loan, a temporary loan, and I gave it to her, and she disappeared. I was a fool, and I admit it, and I realize that there is very little anyone can do about it.’

‘How much?’ Wilde asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘How much was the loan?’

‘Ten thousand pounds,’ McGovern said. ‘She gave me a story about wanting a car, about a bank loan falling through … I’ll spare you the details, Chief Inspector, since I can’t prove it wasn’t a gift, and it really isn’t the issue here.’

‘Is it not?’

‘No,’ McGovern said. ‘The issue is, that I’ve seen Anna, and she …’ he stopped again. This time, he lowered his head. Wilde watched the smooth dark hair, the neatly combed parting, for some seconds, and was taken aback to see tears in the other man’s eyes as he straightened up again. ‘She isn’t any better,’ he said.

‘You’ll have to explain that to me, Mr McGovern.’

‘She was mentally ill. And I see she’s no different.’

‘You see that?’

‘Yes. I’ve seen her.’

Robert Wilde took a deep breath. ‘You’ve seen Anna Miles. When?’

‘This morning. Just now.’

‘Where?’

‘At the Oaks Hotel.’ Wilde said nothing. He could only imagine Anna’s reaction. ‘I saw her in the hotel lobby half an hour ago.’

‘And she talked to you.’

‘Yes, of course she talked to me.’

‘She must have been shocked to see you.’

‘No,’ McGovern said. ‘She knew I was in the area. Presumably she told you much the same thing.’

‘Yes, she told me the same thing.’

‘I’ve been ringing her,’ McGovern said. ‘Trying to get her to see me, but she wouldn’t. I came down to the hotel this morning, and I caught her as she was going out.’

‘And what did she say?’

McGovern gave another low, soft laugh. ‘She was furious.’

‘Furious?’

‘She thinks I’ve tracked her down. She doesn’t believe it’s purely a coincidence. But you’ve heard all that.’

Wilde leaned on the table, crossing his arms, and leaning on them. ‘And what conclusion did you reach, talking to Miss Miles? Between the two of you?’

‘Nothing at all,’ McGovern said. ‘There’s no reasoning with Anna. She’s quite unstable. She was offered treatment, you know, at home, and refused to take it. Medical treatment for her paranoia, her sense of persecution. But she … well, as you know, she thinks she’s perfectly all right and that the rest of the world is at fault.’ McGovern sighed deeply.

‘I mean, what kind of woman leaves her job, her house, her lover and partner, all those who have supported her and cared for her …’

‘I can see why she might think that you had followed her. I might draw the same conclusion, if I were her. It’s quite some coincidence.’

McGovern nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is. I’m as amazed at anyone else at that. But …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That is the truth. And when I knew she was here, when I realized what havoc she has been causing, I felt I had to speak to her.’

‘This morning. That’s the first time you’ve spoken to her.’

‘Yes. She never returned my calls or messages.’ Now, McGovern too leaned forward. ‘And because of what she has said to me, because of the way she’s responded, because I see that, if anything, she is worse, far worse than she ever used to be, if that were possible … then I felt I ought to come and tell you that if Anna Cray makes any sort of accusation against me here, I will take legal advice. I will prove her to be a liar rather than let her tarnish my reputation here.’

Wilde listened to the even tone of the voice. No note of anger, even now. Just resolve. ‘I thought you said there was nothing to prove,’ he commented.

‘So there isn’t,’ McGovern said. ‘Over the money. But if Anna persists in this story that I understand she has told you, of my hounding her all over the country, I shall have no hesitation in proving how she hounded me.’

‘She …?’

McGovern sat back in his chair. ‘She sat outside my house and she telephoned me constantly, and she left …’ He paused. ‘This will sound ridiculous,’ he said. ‘But she left odd things on my path, on my doorstep. Strange things. Peculiar things. Playing cards, railway timetables, stones …’

Robert Wilde found himself staring at him. He thought of Anna’s face, the haunted look in her eyes. He looked into Benedict McGovern’s eyes and saw only equanimity and calm.

‘But even that isn’t the main reason I’m here,’ McGovern said.

‘It isn’t the main reason,’ Wilde heard himself echo.

‘No,’ McGovern replied firmly. ‘The main reason, the thing that really infuriates me, Chief Inspector, is to hear from Mr and Mrs Aubrete that Anna is—well, the very idea astounds me, it just astounds me—but to hear that Anna has lied her way into millions of pounds. Millions! That makes my ten thousand look pretty poor, I must say. That she has somehow found a way to take everything that these people have … people who, I understand, have been kind to her, loved her …’

McGovern’s voice tailed away.

Wilde sat back in his seat and looked at his own hands. ‘Would you excuse me just a moment?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea while you wait?’

‘Thank you,’ McGovern said. ‘That’s very kind.’

‘I’ll be five minutes.’

Robert Wilde rang Wallis in Manningham.

‘Sorry to bother you again,’ he said. ‘But could you check something for me?’

‘Still to do with the girl?’

‘No. Maybe. Can you check a couple of names?’

‘Fire away.’

He asked if there was any record of two instances. The first, of Anna Cray reporting harassment by Benedict McGovern. And, secondly, if Benedict McGovern had reported Anna Cray missing.

He paced the reception, reading even the well-worn posters while he waited for the reply. He watched as one of the duty officers took the tea into McGovern. Wallis took only ten minutes to come back to him.

‘We’ve got the last five years up to speed on computer,’ Wallis told him. ‘And we’ve got the missing person’s report on Anna Cray. Reported missing in May last year by a Mr Benedict McGovern. Place of work confirmed her missing. Car was found in a dealer’s in Bristol. She had taken cash for it. That’s the last we know about her.’

Wilde felt his heart rapidly sinking. ‘And the harassment?’

‘Nothing,’ Wallis said. ‘We can’t find any reports of this same Anna Cray being stalked—followed—whatever. It is the same woman as Anna Miles?’

‘Yes,’ Wilde said. ‘It’s the same.’

He put the phone down.

As he turned away, the WPC who had phoned him earlier called across to him. ‘Chief Inspector, there’s a message for you,’ she said.

‘Who from?’

‘Someone called Carrie Phillips, from the Social Services.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘What was the message?’

The WPC walked over, handing him the written note of the phone conversation. ‘She said it was about the silent girl,’ she said. ‘Does that make sense?’

He tried to fight down a rising tide of frustration. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The WPC read the note again over his shoulder. ‘The silent girl has got out of Brimmer,’ she said.

He folded the note slowly, and put it into his pocket.