“She surely knew that she ought to ring you and tell you where she was.”
“Oh, course she knew. Just didn’t think. Didn’t consider my feelings, and how I’d be worried out of my mind.”
Her eyes strained towards the clock on the mantelpiece. Inspector Paulson knew the signs. Neighbours would be on the telly in five minutes’ time.
Annaleese Marriott had been reported missing on Saturday morning, three days after she had disappeared, by her grandmother. Her activities on the previous Wednesday had been investigated by the police, but they had come to a blank in the early evening. She had gone to work in a nearby small newsagent’s at eight o’clock in the morning, when the newsagent had gone out to deliver papers. This was a regular arrangement, and was rewarded by a pittance. In the afternoon she had gone to help in a corner shop, also a regular occurrence and also rewarded by a pittance. Neither of these regular employments were known to the Social Services office which paid her unemployment benefit. She had gone home for her “teas,” which was the last her grandmother was to see of her. She had gone with friends to a pub in Armley for a couple of hours, then had told them she was going to visit her other grandmother, living in Headingley. There were various buses or combinations of them she could take, but the most likely one was the thirty-eight.
Syd Galopoulos had come to Britain long ago from Cyprus, and he was a long-serving bus driver. He told Inspector Paulson what he could remember about Annaleese.
“It was the nine-thirty from town. Got to the KFC in Armley around nine-fifty. She’d been on my buses before. She smiled and waved her card. I smiled back and she went upstairs.”
“Was it a double-decker? At that time of night?”
“Often is late on, when there’s just a handful. They’re old as hell, and if you get a drunk with a knife who wants to carve up the upholstery it doesn’t matter so much as with a new bus.”
“Were there many on the bus?”
“Just four or five downstairs.”
“And upstairs?”
“Oh — the CCTV wasn’t working, so I don’t... Wait a minute, though. There was an elderly gent went up. I thought to myself: ‘You could save your legs, old chap, by staying down.’ But he didn’t. There’s a lot like it upstairs. Goes back to the time when that’s where you could smoke. They get a better view, without being seen so closely from outside. And some of them will still snatch a ciggie if they think the TV isn’t working.”
“Right. So there was just him and Annaleese.”
“So far as I remember.”
“Who got off first?”
“The girl got off at stop forty-two. I was surprised. She usually gets off at stop forty-seven.”
“Where are those two stops?”
“Forty-two is Backleigh Golf Course, forty-seven is Bellyard Road in Headingley.”
“Bellyard Road is her grandmother’s address — her father’s mother.”
“She got off there usually when she got that bus,” said Syd.
“And the elderly man?”
“Oh — I hadn’t thought about him... Wait... he got off at the same stop. Forty-two. But he didn’t start down the stairs till after the bus stopped — a lot of elderly people do that: fear of falling down if there’s a sharp braking. So he got off the bus a few seconds after the girl.”
“Did they go in the same direction?”
“Oh dear... No, I just can’t remember... But I’ve got a picture in my mind of the girl, standing with her back to one of the garden walls along the road there... like she was waiting, right?”
Inspector Paulson did not like it at all. He had a vision of the two people upstairs making a silent pact: I know you’re interested. I’m interested too. And getting off at a stop with plenty of greenery nearby.
He liked it still less when he had a second talk with her friend Collette Sprigs. She was the friend who had filled him in on Annaleese’s night at the pub with friends.
“I haven’t remembered anything else,” she said when she found him on her doorstep.
“It’s not about Wednesday night,” he said, after he had been led through to the sitting room, watched by the careful eye of Collette’s mother. “It’s about what sort of girl Annaleese was. Is.” He was glad that Collette thought before answering.
“You know when girls disappear or get murdered, someone describes her as fun-loving?”
“Yes. Was that the sort of girl Annaleese was?”
“No, it’s the sort of girl she wasn’t. No way. I don’t mean she went around moping all the time, but there was always something there — some thought, something she didn’t want to talk about.”
“Why was she living with her grandmother?”
“’Cos her family collapsed. Evaporated. First her father went, then her mother said she couldn’t cope with her, and went off to live with a Huddersfield man.”
“Was she bitter about that?”
“What do you think? She wouldn’t be over the moon, would she? She said her mother ‘didn’t give a toss’ about her, called her father a ‘bastard’, and said she’d never had a childhood like other children had. Yes, I’d say she was bitter.”
“Did she ever go into details?”
“No. Absolutely not. Never a hint. We guessed there’d been some kind of abuse, but we didn’t ask. Didn’t dare to, to tell the truth. She was good at shutting down entirely.”
“But she had two grandmothers.”
“That’s a laugh. The one she lived with hated having to provide a home for her, and was always encouraging her to get out, maybe find a man. The other one she visited to screw money out of.”
“How did she do that?”
“That’s her father’s mother. We wondered if there was a bit of blackmail involved: ‘sub me regular or I’ll go to the police about what my dad did to me.’”
“I see... Did Annaleese have any special boyfriend?”
“One she was sleeping with? Not regular, not at all. She did sleep with men or boys now and then, when she wanted something from them — money, going anywhere in their car, going on a shoplifting spree to one of the big supermarkets... But the boys always said she wasn’t interested.”
“In sex, or with them?”
“I don’t suppose they knew, or thought about it like that.”
“I must say I don’t like the sound of all this,” said Paulson. “She seems so vulnerable. Who else did she try and blackmail other than her grandmother? Blackmail, even small-scale blackmail, is a crime for professionals.”
“We never thought of her like that,” said Collette. “We just thought she’d come through things pretty strong.”
Inspector Paulson began to feel increasingly uneasy about Annaleese. He gave a small-scale press conference where he highlighted the man on the thirty-eight bus, asking him to come forward, asking if anyone reading the publicity knew of his likely identity. He got two or three really good likenesses of Annaleese, and asked anyone who had seen her in the last week to come forward.
Then he went to see her paternal grandmother.
Mrs. Knox was a hard-faced woman who let him in reluctantly and talked when possible in monosyllables, usually negative ones: No, she hadn’t seen her granddaughter on Wednesday night, no she hadn’t seen or heard from her subsequently. She knew of no trouble she was in. She was obviously a bitter, not a loving, grandparent.
“She came to see you fairly often, didn’t she?” Paulson asked.
“Aye. When she wanted anything,” was the tight-lipped reply.
“Her friends say you were generous to her with money.”
“Oh, they say that, do they? Well, I’m only a pensioner, and I’ve nothing tucked away. I gave her small sums now and then. Bus fares and that.”