Wednesday 31 October, 8.30 a.m.
Joanna turned up at Ryland’s unannounced and found Sister Matilda Warrender in her office working through the night’s reports. When Joanna’s knock registered, she looked up, hope flaring briefly in her eyes, but quickly dying at Joanna’s shake of the head.
‘Nothing?’
‘No. I’m sorry. There’s no sign of him.’
There was no mistaking her chagrin. But she picked herself up. ‘So?’ The tacit question was, what are you doing here?
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’ She cleared some papers from the chair. ‘What can I do for you?’
And suddenly Joanna was lost for words. Matilda Warrender watched her expectantly; she had to say something but she couldn’t find the right phrase.
So she plunged in, as though to a hot tub or a chill pool. ‘The toy that went missing. Was there anything special about it?’
Matilda looked even more bemused. ‘I don’t think so.’ She was frowning slightly, her fingers weaving, her whole attitude troubled.
Joanna sensed her thoughts were either focusing on the last time she’d seen her patient, perhaps mourning the missing toy and his distress when he’d realized it was gone. Or maybe she was wondering whether to call the station and find out whether the DI in charge of the case was in her right mind.
After a brief pause, the matron related events as she’d seen them.
‘It was the morning of Thursday the eighteenth,’ she began, slowly at first. ‘It was late in the morning when the day nurses told me that Mr Foster appeared agitated because his teddy bear was missing.’
‘Had that happened before?’
‘No.’ Honesty prevailed. ‘At least not to my knowledge.’ She continued, ‘He’d grabbed Shawna by the arm, leaving her with quite a bruise. He was quite strong, you know. Ned Sheringham said he lashed out at him when he went to give him a bath. Accused him of stealing it. Naturally Ned summoned me.’
‘So you spoke to Mr Foster.’
‘Yes, I did. He was adamant someone had stolen his teddy. He was very upset. I sat with him for a while, got the staff to search under the bed, in the bathroom, the wardrobe. Everywhere.’
‘But it didn’t turn up.’
‘No.’
‘And it hasn’t turned up since?’
‘No.’
‘When did the substitute bear arrive?’
‘I don’t know.’ She looked flustered by the question. ‘It was just there. I’m not sure when it appeared but Zac was having none of it. I think it was there that day, but when, I’m not sure. One of the staff must have found it and out of kindness gave it to him.’ And then she stopped speaking, her eyes wide open. ‘I think,’ she said slowly. ‘I think it was there that morning. I seem to remember it on the floor – where he’d thrown it. I handed it back to him.’
Joanna felt that she was at last getting somewhere. This was tangible fact. No coincidence then. The toy had been substituted. But she kept her tone calm and measured.
‘How did he respond to that?’
Ms Warrender was back on track. ‘Not well, I’m afraid,’ she said with a smile. ‘He threw it across the room and was …’ She seemed to lose track of what she was saying before finishing, ‘Frankly he was inconsolable.’
A pause while her brow furrowed and her clear eyes met Joanna’s. ‘You think there’s a connection, don’t you?’
Joanna was cautious. ‘It would seem so.’
But then Ms Warrender called her bluff. ‘How?’ And when Joanna didn’t answer she sat thoughtfully while Joanna appraised her.
A trained nurse, divorced since her twenties, with a business head that Rupert Murdoch would have envied. Underneath all that starch and professionalism, she actually had a kind heart and a conscience. Realizing she was being sized up, the matron waited patiently for some response from Joanna, her head on one side balanced on her thin neck. Matilda, or Tillie as she was called behind her back, always wore an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform, a dark blue cotton dress. Had she been asked why she wore such an outdated uniform, which she never had, she would have had her answer ready. Self-righteous and prim. A professional uniform indicates a professional attitude.
‘So,’ Joanna said slowly. ‘Where did that new teddy come from?’
Matilda looked confused. ‘I don’t know.’ Now she was looking troubled. ‘I haven’t asked. With Zac going a few days later, I suppose at the time it didn’t seem important. I just forgot about it.’
‘Has anyone actually admitted they put the new teddy bear there?’
The response was a slow shake of the head.
‘Do you know when Mr Foster’s bear was last seen?’
Matilda shook her head.
The nurse’s grey eyes flickered and Joanna knew their thoughts were moving along the same track. ‘You think someone deliberately substituted the other teddy? You think there’s a connection to his disappearance? How?’
Joanna didn’t even attempt to answer but tried to keep the subject neutral. ‘Let’s put it to the test, shall we? We can ask some of the staff if they have any idea who substituted the teddy bears.’
But the trouble with trying to pin down the last sighting of an object most of them had seen all the time and commonly ignored was that no one could give an exact response.
Ned Sheringham proffered the most reasonable account. Presumably Zac’s original bear had been there when he’d gone to sleep on the Wednesday night before he disappeared – otherwise he would not have settled. Which shone a light on the staff who’d been on duty on the Wednesday evening, through the night, and on the Thursday morning before Zac had left.
And as luck would have it Jubilee Watkins, Ned Sheringham and Shawna Wilson had all been working a late shift on the Wednesday and an early shift on the Thursday. The night staff had also been the same: Joan Arkwright, Susie Trent and Amelia Boden.
Joanna began with Ned.
He was a cocky guy in his mid-thirties, with bright blond hair and a slight lisp which emphasized a broad Potteries accent. He swaggered in, hands in pockets.
Joanna tried to keep the conversation casual rather than an interrogation. She didn’t want to alert the staff to the fact that she was focusing not so much on Mr Foster but his missing toy.
‘Ned,’ she said, ‘I want you to think back to the Wednesday night before Mr Foster went missing.’ Sheringham raised his eyebrows at the mention of Wednesday but made no comment.
‘I understand you and the other two members of staff on duty that evening put him to bed and gave him his night sedation?’
His response was predictable. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sometimes if we’ve got time, if we’re quiet, we help out the night staff and do some of their stuff for them.’
‘Did you personally put Mr Foster to bed that night?’
‘Yeah, me and Jubilee.’
‘Was there anything different about that particular night that sticks out?’
Sheringham thought for a moment then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. He went to bed like a lamb. Cuddling his old teddy. He was quiet and settled down. I thought they’d have a quiet night with him.’
He looked enquiringly at Joanna, as if wondering at the turn her questioning was taking. Then his gaze dropped to her bulging abdomen and seemed to find an explanation there. Joanna could have stood up and aimed a punch at his nose.
She tried to keep the next question equally casual. ‘So he was cuddling his teddy and went to sleep.’
‘Yeah. So we settled everyone down and then the night staff—’
Joanna interrupted. ‘What time was this?’
‘Just before nine. Shawna said she’d do the report so me and Jubilee could sneak off early.’
‘And that’s what you did?’
‘Yeah, well I did. Jubilee disappeared off into the ladies.’ He made a face which looked comical – a shrug of his shoulders, an eye roll and a mischievous grin. ‘Getting changed and putting her make-up on, I expect. I think she was going out somewhere.’
Joanna nodded. ‘OK. And then you were on duty in the morning?’
‘Yeah. No rest for the wicked, me mam used to say,’ he said.
Joanna’s too, but it had been accompanied by a glare which had confirmed her status in her mother’s eyes. That’s the trouble with being a daddy’s girl – particularly when that daddy has scarpered off with a newer, younger woman. Her mother had never quite forgiven her for still loving her father after he had abandoned them. But what else can you do?
‘And in the morning …’ she prompted.
‘He was awful. Lashing out, accusing us of stealing his beloved toy. Uncontrollable. I had to call Tillie.’ Another naughty grin. ‘Sister Warrender.’
‘And the teddy?’ she prompted delicately.
‘It was a different one. Brown instead of black.’
‘Any idea how it got there – the other teddy, I mean?’
Ned shook his head.
‘You didn’t ask the other members of staff?’
The question didn’t even ruffle his feathers and, sensing she had extracted everything useful from him, she moved on.
She spoke to Shawna Wilson second, a petite, bubbly young character with red hair, who looked about seventeen. Her smile was friendly and open and her story more or less followed her colleague’s.
Jubilee Watkins was a different character completely. Jamaican in origins, though another candidate with a Potteries accent, this time overlaid with Caribbean patois. She was nicely rounded, an imposing presence, but held a wary, suspicious air. She was patently on her guard. Whether that was to do with a natural wariness of the police, perhaps because of her colour, Joanna wasn’t sure. She was uneasy from the first but her black eyes stared at Joanna with a bold expression.
‘He go to bed like a little lamb that night,’ she said with an abstracted smile, and Joanna sensed that Jubilee was fond of the old man. More than the other members of staff. She let her reflect for a moment before asking the next question.
‘Cuddling his teddy bear?’
That was when she saw a note of panic. And Jubilee’s response was halted. ‘Of course.’
And then she smiled again at the memory. ‘He always go to bed like that, his arm around Pooh Bear.’
‘You had a name for it?’ Joanna asked softly
The girl nodded. Guilt seeping out of her pores. She could hardly lift her eyelids, that guilt was so heavy.
Joanna picked up her question. ‘But in the morning?’
The girl looked at her with a stricken look. ‘It wasn’t there.’ Her shoulders dropped.
‘So what do you think happened to it?’
From somewhere Jubilee dragged a hint of strength. In her eyes was a gleam of panic. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It must have got lost somehow.’
Joanna didn’t need to be a trained detective to pinpoint the fact that between an old man falling asleep, helped by the home’s policy of sleeping tablets, his arm around a beloved toy that he had clung on to since a child and waking up in the morning, his arms encircling a substitute soft toy indicated intervention.
‘So what do you think happened to Pooh Bear?’
Jubilee had a practised answer ready. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that it must have dropped on to the floor and somehow ended up in the waste-paper basket. And then it got thrown out with the rubbish.’
She was word perfect, this explanation vaguely possible if improbable.
‘And the other bear?’
‘Oh, there’s always stuff lying around.’
Joanna fixed the girl with a stare. ‘Is there anything else you wish to tell me, Jubilee?’
Jubilee shook her head, holding her breath, waiting, no doubt, for Joanna to swallow the lies she had been feeding her.
‘So what do you think has happened to your patient?’
Joanna saw, from the drooping of the girl’s shoulders and a soft exhalation of air, that she was relieved Joanna had shifted her focus from the teddy bear to Mr Foster.
And again she had an explanation – of sorts – up her sleeve. ‘I think,’ she said, eyes fixed on the detective, ‘that someone must have taken him in.’
‘And missed out on all the searches and appeals?’
The girl waved her arms around. ‘That’s what I think, Inspector Piercy. I am sure he is alive and safe.’ She hesitated before adding, ‘He’s a lovely man. One of my favourites.’
‘Thank you very much.’
Joanna waited until the girl was halfway through the door before she asked her final question. ‘Was there anything special about Mr Foster’s little teddy bear?’
Jubilee didn’t even turn around. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, comfortable now. ‘It was a tatty old toy.’
‘Thank you.’
Matilda Warrender was waiting for her outside the door. ‘Any luck?’
‘Sort of.’
Ms Warrender was holding something which she handed to Joanna. ‘This,’ she said, ‘is the bear that Mr Foster threw on the floor when his own toy went missing.’
Joanna took the bear and studied it, her mind a mixture of emotion. Her child would, no doubt, have something like this snuggled in his cot. Matthew had already bought a Steiff teddy, tan in colour with a rather sweet face. It sat in the corner of the nursery he’d already decorated. Joanna was no expert in children’s soft toys, but this one looked poor quality, its fur matted nylon, one ear chewed. Much of its body was threadbare and an eye was attached with a loose loop of black cotton, sewn on amateurishly with large, uneven stitches. She stared at it. Dumb and uninspiring as it was, this was the first clue which would lead her to the fate of the missing man.
‘May I take this?’
Bemused, Ms Warrender nodded.