‘But Pops, Mia’s trouble. Remember how she just disappeared all those years ago? Remember how. .?’
‘Remember you were only thirteen at the time,’ I countered. ‘Impressionable, volatile and full of emerging hormones. Your recollections of that time may not be one hundred per cent accurate.’
‘Maybe not,’ she persisted, ‘but I do know this. You talk a lot about the past, especially to me. It’s always “Remember this?” and “Remember that?” It’s the way you are. Yet, since Mia disappeared, you have never mentioned her name, not once, not ever. So please don’t tell me her turning up means nothing to you. You’ve never lied to me before. Please don’t start now.’
‘Okay,’ I replied, ‘I won’t. It’s true; I hoped I’d never see her again. But it’s not my investigation and it’s not my force that’s looking into her mother’s death, so there is no reason why I should. So don’t you worry. .’
‘If you say “. . your pretty little head” I will scream. I’ll stop worrying when they lock up whoever killed her mother so that she can stay wherever the hell it was she went off to!’
Me too, kid, I thought when she’d calmed down, and hung up, me too.
Fifty-Eight
Karen Neville and Jackie Wright enjoyed basking in the warmth of their triumph in the unmasking of Bella Watson’s unsuspected daughter, for as long as it lasted.
It ended with a phone call from Sammy Pye, asking for an immediate update after having his Saturday interrupted by the head of CID, wanting to know why it had taken the accidental intervention of the director of the SCDEA to unlock the secret.
‘Mary’s being good about it,’ he said. ‘She’s blaming it on Mackenzie, but the way she feels about him at the moment, she’d blame him for global bloody warming. But I slipped up, no doubt about it; it never occurred to me to check whether the victim had any other children. What I haven’t told her, though, is that Sauce and I actually heard about her last night, from young Hicks’s granny.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes, but then we were sidetracked by a call to the monitoring unit, so we didn’t have a chance to log it in. It was on my to-do list for Monday.’
‘Your secret is safe with me,’ Karen promised him. ‘But don’t take it all on yourself; that photograph in the flat kidded me too. We weren’t the first to be fooled either, either. Andy told me that when he was in Watson’s house twenty-odd years ago, with Bob Skinner, it was the same. There were pictures of her and the boys, but no sign that there had ever been a daughter. They wouldn’t have known about her, he said, if Bella hadn’t mentioned her.’
‘And Andy met her then?’
‘Yes, but just the once. She made an impression, though. She was on radio, but from what he said she should have been on telly. Mind you, he was impressionable then,’ she added.
Pye chuckled. ‘I’ll let you into a secret; I am not so old that I don’t remember Mia Sparkles myself. I must have been about sixteen when she was on the radio, on that Airburst station.’
‘She passed me by,’ she commented, ‘but then I was a Radio Forth girl.’
‘Andy’s right about her looks,’ the DI said, softly. ‘I remember her face was on billboard posters for a couple of weeks, and it was a traffic hazard. She had a big audience among teenage kids in and around Edinburgh. She used to talk about things that they were actually experiencing, voice-breaking, periods, wet dreams, that sort of stuff.’
‘From what you’re saying,’ Karen laughed, ‘there must have been a few wet dreams about her.’
‘I’m sure there were. And then she just disappeared. I actually remember tuning into Airburst that day, after school. They trailed her programme as usual, but when the time came she wasn’t there. The previous presenter just carried on, saying that Mia Sparkles had been unavoidably detained, but she never did turn up.’
‘So I gather. Did it make the papers? I can’t recall.’
‘Yes. It was a one-week wonder. The rival radio stations rubbed it in big time, as you’d expect. It was the beginning of a very short end for Airburst. It folded not long after that.’
‘I wonder if she was ever listed as a missing person,’ the DS mused.
‘I’ve been wondering the same,’ Pye told her. ‘To tell you the truth, in my early days in CID, I actually looked her up and she wasn’t. But of course, I never knew her real name was Watson. In fact that makes me think; it might be worth checking again, under that surname. If she was reported missing, and she’s never been found, she should still be on a list, even going that far back. Could you do that for me, now?’
‘Yes, I will,’ Neville said, ‘but what will it tell us?’
‘It’ll tell us who reported her. That might be interesting.’
‘True,’ she admitted. ‘I’ll get on it and let you know.’
‘No!’ he protested, laughing. ‘I’m off duty, remember.’
She left him to the rest of his weekend, and called the missing person records office. It was on skeleton staffing, and as she expected, her request for a trace on a report going back three decades was greeted unenthusiastically.
‘I’ll get back to you,’ the civilian clerk sighed, after he had noted the details.
‘Within half an hour,’ she added.
‘Oh, I don’t know if I can do that,’ the man warned.
‘I do. This is a live inquiry. So pull your finger out, please.’
She left him to it and made herself a coffee from the CID room supply, being careful to drop a pound coin into the kitty tin. She would have made two, but Wright was deep in conversation.
She took it back to her temporary desk, and was wondering whether there was a doughnut shop within walking distance of Queen Charlotte Street, when she was interrupted by another call.
That guy must have taken me seriously, she thought, smiling, as she took it, but the voice on the line, although male, was much older.
‘Is that the officer in charge of the Watson investigation?’
‘For today only, yes. Detective Sergeant Karen Neville.’
‘No DI there?’
‘Afraid not,’ she replied, mildly annoyed. ‘I’m as good as it gets over the weekend.’
‘Of course, sorry, Sergeant.’ The man was contrite. ‘Don’t mind me. My name is Tom Partridge, detective superintendent, retired for more than a few years. There’s something I think I should report to you. I had a visit yesterday from a young man, a very young man indeed. He turned up on my doorstep, wanting to ask me about a book that I wrote after I handed in my a warrant card. It was about the life and times of a villain called Perry Holmes. Have you heard of him?’
‘Yes I have, and I’ve heard of you too, Mr Partridge.’
The old man laughed, softly. ‘The old crank with the bee in his bonnet, eh?’
‘No,’ she contradicted him, ‘a well-respected officer, who left a lot of good things behind him in this force.’
‘You can flatter me any time, Sarge; I love it. Anyway, this kid introduced himself as Marlon Hicks, and it became obvious he was quite upset. He said he’d tried to get a copy of my book from the Central Library. . it’s either that or the charity shops these days. . but the librarian there told him the only copy was out. As it happened, I go there quite a lot and the lady knows where I live, so she sent him along to see me.’
‘Was it wise for her to do that?’
‘Aye, it was fine,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got no problem with it. I know who to let over my door and who to keep on the step. This boy I let in and I talked to him. He told me a very strange story, and a sad one too. He’d just found out the day before, he said, that he was the son of a man called Marlon Watson.’
‘I know,’ Neville said. ‘It was me who told him. We had to interview him in connection with the Bella Watson murder inquiry. . I’m assuming you know about that. . and there was no way I couldn’t tell him why.’