‘I don’t know,’ Farnham said stiffly. ‘But there may be an ex…’
‘So I say to myself’ – Vetter overrode him – ‘that if there are such things as ‘thin spots,’ this one would begin at Archway and Finsbury Park… but the very thinnest part is here at Crouch End. And I say to myself, wouldn’t it be a day if the last of the leather between us and what’s on the inside that ball just… rubbed away? Wouldn’t it be a day if even half of what that woman told us was true?’
Farnham was silent. He had decided that PC Vetter probably also believed in palmistry and phrenology and the Rosicrucians.
‘Read the back file,’ Vetter said, getting up. There was a crackling sound as he put his hands in the small of his back and stretched. ‘I’m going out to get some fresh air.’ He strolled out. Farnham looked after him with a mixture of amusement and resentment. Vetter was dotty, all right. He was also a bloody fag-mooch. Fags didn’t come cheap in this brave new world of the welfare state. He picked up Vetter’s notebook and began leafing through the girl’s story again.
And, yes, he would go through the back file.
He would do it for laughs.
The girl – or young woman, if you wanted to be politically correct (and all Americans did these days, it seemed) – had burst into the station at quarter past ten the previous evening, her hair in damp strings around her face, her eyes bulging. She was dragging her purse by the strap. ‘Lonnie,’ she said. ‘Please, you’ve got to find Lonnie.’
‘Well, we’ll do our best, won’t we?’ Vetter said. ‘But you’ve got to tell us who Lonnie is.’ ‘He’s dead,’ the young woman said. ‘I know he is.’ She began to cry. Then she began to laugh – to cackle, really. She dropped her purse in front of her. She was hysterical.
The station was fairly deserted at that hour on a weeknight. Sergeant Raymond was listening to a Pakistani woman tell, with almost unearthly calm, how her purse had been nicked on Hillfield Avenue by a yob with a lot of football tattoos and a great coxcomb of blue hair. Vetter saw Farnham come in from the anteroom, where he had been taking down old posters (HAVE YOU ROOM IN YOUR HEART FOR AN UNWANTED CHILD?) and putting up new ones (SIX RULES FOR SAFE NIGHT-CYCLING).
Vetter waved Farnham forward and Sergeant Raymond, who had looked round at once when he heard the American woman’s semi-hysterical voice, back. Raymond, who liked breaking pickpockets’ fingers like breadsticks (‘Aw, c’mon, mate,’ he’d say if asked to justify this extra-legal proceeding, ‘fifty million wogs can’t be wrong’), was not the man for a hysterical woman.
‘Lonnie!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, please, they’ve got Lonnie!’. The Pakistani woman turned toward the young American woman, studied her calmly for a moment, then turned back to Sergeant Raymond and continued to tell him how her purse had been snatched.
‘Miss…’ PC Farnham began.
‘What’s going on out there?’ she whispered. Her breath was coming in quick pants. Farnham noticed there was a slight scratch on her left cheek. She was a pretty little hen with nice bubs – small but pert – and a great cloud of auburn hair. Her clothes were moderately expensive. The heel had come off one of her shoes.
‘What’s going on out there?’ she repeated. ‘Monsters…’
The Pakistani woman looked over again… and smiled. Her teeth were rotten. The smile was gone like a conjurer’s trick, and she took the Lost and Stolen Property form Raymond was holding out to her.
‘Get the lady a cup of coffee and bring it down to Room Three,’ Vetter said. ‘Could you do with a cup of coffee, love?’
‘Lonnie,’ she whispered. ‘I know he’s dead.’
‘Now, you just come along with old Ted Vetter and we’ll sort this out in a jiff,’ he said, and helped her to her feet. She was still talking in a low moaning voice when he led her away with one arm snugged around her waist. She was rocking unsteadily because of the broken shoe. Farnham got the coffee and brought it into Room Three, a plain white cubicle furnished with a scarred table, four chairs, and a water cooler in the corner. He put the coffee in front of her.
‘Here, love,’ he said, ‘this’ll do you good. I’ve got some sugar if…’
‘I can’t drink it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t…’ And then she clutched the porcelain cup, someone’s long-forgotten souvenir of Blackpool, in her hands as if for warmth. Her hands were shaking quite badly, and Farnham wanted to tell her to put it down before she slopped the coffee and scalded herself.
‘I couldn’t,’ she said again. Then she drank, still holding the cup two-handed, the way a child will hold his cup of broth. And when she looked at them, it was a child’s look – simple, ex-hausted, appealing… and at bay, somehow. It was as if whatever had happened had somehow shocked her young; as if some invisible hand had swooped down from the sky and slapped the last twenty years out of her, leaving a child in grownup American clothes in this small white interrogation room in Crouch End.
‘Lonnie,’ she said. ‘The monsters,’ she said. ‘Will you help me? Will you please help me?
Maybe he isn’t dead. Maybe…
‘I’m an American citizen!’ she cried suddenly, and then, as if she had said something deeply shameful, she began to sob.
Vetter patted her shoulder. ‘There, love. I think we can help find your Lonnie. Your husband, is he?’
Still sobbing, she nodded. ‘Danny and Norma are back at the hotel… with the sitter… they’ll be sleeping… expecting him to kiss them when we come in…’
‘Now if you could just relax and tell us what happened…’
‘And where it happened,’ Farnham added. Vetter looked up at him swiftly, frowning. ‘But that’s just it!’ she cried. ‘I don’t know where it happened! I’m not even sure what happened, except that it was h-huh-horrible.’
Vetter had taken out his notebook. ‘What’s your name, love?’
‘Doris Freeman. My husband is Leonard Freeman. We’re staying at the Hotel Inter-Continental. We’re American citizens.’ This time the statement of nationality actually seemed to steady her a little. She sipped her coffee and put the mug down. Farnham saw that the palms of her hands were quite red. You’ll feel that later, dearie, he thought. Vetter was drudging it all down in his notebook. Now he looked momentarily at PC Farnham, just an unobtrusive flick of the eyes.
‘Are you on holiday?’ he asked.
‘Yes… two weeks here and one in Spain. We were supposed to have a week in Barcelona… but this isn’t helping find Lonnie! Why are you asking me these stupid questions?’ ‘Just trying to get the background, Mrs. Freeman,’ Farnham said. Without really thinking about it, both of them had adopted low, soothing voices. ‘Now you go ahead and tell us what happened. Tell it in your own words.’
‘Why is it so hard to get a taxi in London?’ she asked abruptly. Farnham hardly knew what to say, but Vetter responded as if the question were utterly germane to the discussion.
‘Hard to say. Tourists, partly. Why? Did you have trouble getting someone who’d take you out here to Crouch End?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We left the hotel at three and came down to Hatchard’s Bookshop. Is that Haymarket?’
‘Near to,’ Vetter agreed. ‘Lovely big bookshop, love, isn’t it?’
‘We had no trouble getting a cab from the Inter-Continental… they were lined up outside. But when we came out of Hatchard’s, there was nothing. Finally, when one did stop, the driver just laughed and shook his head when Lonnie said we wanted to go to Crouch End.’ ‘Aye, they can be right barstards about the suburbs, beggin your pardon, love,’ Farnham said. ‘He even refused a pound tip,’ Doris Freeman said, and a very American perplexity had crept into her tone. ‘We waited for almost half an hour before we got a driver who said he’d take us. It was five-thirty by then, maybe quarter of six. And that was when Lonnie discovered he’d lost the address…’