Waiting only for the man behind the counter to make them all a cup of tea, and for Cori to park the car somewhere less obstructive to the public going about their business; the three of them sat down in a nook that, though small in itself, took up around a third of the floorspace of the shop, at least in Grey’s estimation.
Cori would have concurred with him, approaching Chad’s Classics more observantly the second time of entering; she being a buyer of music over the Internet, and so never herself a patron. She expected an estate agent might have classed it a boutique store, and with this status owing more to scale than exclusivity, it comprising little more than a window-shelf display and counter with a walkway between, a record-racked area at one end, and a small seated area at the other. And it was on these seats where the three now gathered.
She noticed how the man made no effort to shut the shop or put a sign out; also how well he and the Inspector seemed to know each, to the degree that Grey’s arrival was seen instantly as something important, and requiring of putting aside the concerns of his business for an hour.
‘This is Sergeant Cornelia Smith,’ he introduced. ‘And Cori, I don’t know if you know..?’
‘No I don’t, sorry.’
‘Chad Glazier, of Chad’s Classics.’
The two shook hands, Chad enquiring of her, ‘I don’t think I spoke to you before?’
‘No,’ answered Grey on her behalf, turning to her, ‘I think you would have been on maternity leave at the time?’
‘Oh, you have children? How old?’ asked Chad, surprising Cori, it usually being the women you met who wanted to know baby names and exchange photos.
‘Yes, Brooke and Connor. She’s three, Connor will be five soon.’ As she spoke she fished out of her bag the keyfob photo of them both she kept for only these occasions. Chad took it and looked with genuine warmth. ‘Do you have any of your own then?’ she asked.
‘Yes, a little boy, Charlie,’ he answered, opening his wallet to show his photo in return. ‘Well, maybe not so little now – he’ll be eight in a couple of weeks.’
‘They grow up so soon, don’t they?’
‘And it’s worse when you don’t live with them. Every time you see them they’re bigger.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ started Cori.
‘It’s okay. His mother and I split up.’ Chad spoke almost apologetically. ‘It was a bit stressful there for a while, but we get on much better now.’
‘Well, that is good.’ There seemed little else to say, she suddenly feeling a little sad. ‘So,’ resumed the Sergeant brightly, hoping to lighten the mood, ‘what did I miss?’
‘Just under three years ago,’ began Grey, ‘Chad here was a witness in the disappearance of Isobel Semple.’
‘She was here on the last night anyone saw her,’ added Chad of his own validation.
‘I don’t know if you ever saw the file, Cori..?’
She hadn’t, but like everyone in town, police or otherwise, she had known the case inside out; and though it had been a while since it had been a day to day occurrence to hear some snippet of news or new rumour about her vanishing, it did not take very long for the details to flood back.
‘You’ll recall,’ continued Grey, ‘that there was a lad she knew, a boyfriend, or at least a male acquaintance – they were reported as been often seen around together. He’d be in here at times too, wouldn’t he?’
Chad nodded.
‘Well, we never found him, he never came forward, and he wasn’t seen in town again from that day on; the day Isobel left that letter with her friend to give to her mother, telling her she was leaving.’
‘And he was a strange lad,’ Chad took up the narrative, ‘just a little kid, but wired, you know? Like only he knew that he was the centre of something really important. Came from an unhappy home, I always thought. I felt nothing for him – he was only here because she was, and I liked her. But when it came to the crunch, and the Inspector asked us, well... none of us knew anything about him.’
‘Over-and-over,’ explained Grey, ‘her friends, and the customers here, and anyone else who’d seen him around town, described him as being sallow, whey-faced, as indistinct a figure as you could hope to see. Well, we can see that for ourselves now. I mean,’ he held the image up on his mobile phone touchscreen for all to see, ‘how would you go about instructing someone to construct a photofit of that? I mean, even his own mother would have difficulty describing him to a stranger. And that was all part of the deal, because there was not one distinctive or identifying mark upon him, and yet...’
‘And yet,’ Chad took over, ‘the only name any of us ever had for him was Scar, like that blinking lion in the film! He’d be sitting here, with a few others of us maybe, not ever saying much I remember, just whispering in Isi’s ear or sharing some private joke with her – they used to burst into laughter at the same things, or where no one else in the room knew what the joke was! – and then his phone would go off, and he’d jump up and be on the pavement outside talking loudly to whoever it was, and he’d be all, “This is Scar, it’s the Scar Man, what’s up?” All that street talk, you know?’
‘In short he was an idiot,’ Grey clarified for no one’s benefit.
‘Now, I looked, and I never saw a scar on him anywhere, and nor did anyone else. And now you tell me his name was S Carman? So how did you find him?’ asked Chad after a pause.
‘He’s turned up in another enquiry. We can’t take too much credit,’ answered Grey modestly.
‘Drugs is it? Oh, I appreciate you can’t tell me. But I bet it is.’
‘We can’t say.’
‘I sometimes thought they were taking something together, she used to come in glassy-eyed at times, dazed. Of course they were young – they drank, they took things, I don’t know. She used to hang out here a lot at the shop, after school or when she didn’t want to go home. She never bought anything, she didn’t have any money! I don’t know if she even really liked music that much. Perhaps here was the only place she didn’t get kicked out of? She used to let me play whatever I liked, and she’d sit down here with a sausage roll or can of Coke or whatever she’d lifted from wherever; I don’t think she ever had a meal at home. God, she hated her mum...’
Cori, holding her tea and with her back to the shop window, looked up at the posters above the men’s heads, images of bands and records and concerts: one in particular caught her eye, of a baby swimming after a dollar bill dangled from a fishing line, which seemed to say something profound about society, but she wasn’t sure exactly what; another simply showed two sleek greyhounds tearing around the corner of a racetrack, sand thrown up from their feet, their faces contorted in what could have been glee, but which could equally have been the panic and fury of those competing in the rat race. Much more comforting was the only one that she, never an avid record buyer, recognised: that of the brass band in bright tunics, stood before flowerbeds and backed by their heroes cast in wax like a gallery at Madam Tussauds. But she wasn’t to be allowed even this one comforting image,
‘It’s a funeral, you know,’ said Chad, breaking from his narrative upon seeing the focus of her attention, ‘or so they say.’
‘No it’s not,’ answered Cori, ‘it’s a band playing in the park. My mum had that album. She used to play it me as a girl.’ She found herself becoming irrationally upset at his callous dispelling of her childhood memory.
‘Of course it is. It’s full of sadness – you’ve just got to see the signs. I mean, half the people standing behind them were dead even when they made the album; and look at this four, the band’s own waxworks, standing to one side, dressed in black; look at the sadness on that one face there.’ He pointed at a young mopheaded man, who upon inspection did look fit to flood with waxwork tears.
‘So who is he mourning for?’
‘Who knows? Perhaps his own past, the world they left behind? Your guess is as good as mine. There are theories of course.’
‘I suppose you don’t see these things when you’
re a kid,’ she said resignedly, determined not to let him know how irked his clever-dick attitude had left her. But on with the investigation, and having the blanks filled in by two men more than happy to spend an hour wallowing again in the mystery of Isobel Semple,
‘Of course, it was never strictly a police matter, never a crime even.’ Grey was doing most of the talking now, Chad offering colour commentary, a detail or two when the spirit took him. Cori thought how desperately sad Chad looked as the Inspector told the tale. ‘She left a letter; she told friends she was going; there was no hint of wrongdoing... and had she been only a couple of weeks older we wouldn’t even have opened a file on her.’
‘But she was only seventeen...’
‘The parents were soon in touch, and we wanted to help them, if only to find their daughter and arrange a phone call home. She was still technically a child. And of course,’ continued Grey, ‘we thought it would be easier, that she’d turn up in days, that she’d check into a hostel or get picked up on the streets. We couldn’t know then that we would find nothing, that she could just... vanish. A cliché I know, but there you go – she just went.
‘And then the paper started up its campaigning... This was during that bloody awful winter we had. I think in people’s minds they thought she was out there in the snow somewhere, lost and cold. And then those little blue flowers came out, and the paper started calling her Southney’s Snowdrop. And how could we give up then, once the town was mobilised and parents were petitioning, and the school-kids were being told about her in assembly, and the local press were asking at the station every day?’
‘And her mum gave them that photo of her when she was fifteen,’ recalled Chad, ‘all smiling and angelic, and before she’d got the purple streaks in her hair and her lip pierced.’
‘And I think from that day on that image of her was fixed firmly in the public’s consciousness of that being her when she vanished, even if it gave her age as seventeen right beside the picture on the page.’
‘She was a student, wasn’t she?’ asked Cori.
‘Yes, at the sixth form college; although only nominally so judging by her recent reports. The teachers told us it happened a lot with kids from her background: she had grown up in Henthills, although her parents had since moved the family out a bit towards the suburbs.
‘Not the best start.’
‘No, not our town’s most salubrious district.’
‘And so did anything happen on the day she left?’
The Inspector’s beguiled expression suggested not, ‘On that day, the tenth of January, getting on for three years ago now, she was here with her friends, as was often the case, before... well, ask your man here.’
‘Yes,’ started Chad, ‘she was hanging about, not buying anything as usual. She was with her mate Connie. I was stacking at the other end of the shop. I think she’d been asking me to give her a job – she was always doing that. I said, as I always did, “So, it isn’t enough that I let you hang around here for free, you actually want paying for it?” And she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter, ‘cos I’m leaving anyway,” and then she went into a sulk. She knew I was joking, we never properly argued.’
‘Tell her about the letter.’
‘Oh, yes.’ The younger man, duly prompted, began, ‘Well, I must have been in and out of the storeroom as I missed the girls arguing at first. They were fine one minute, and then before I knew it they were screaming at one another – you know how teenagers can get, they’re so passionate about everything, always quarrelling. I thought, what’s started all this? But it was all over nothing, all over a letter Isobel had produced from somewhere.
‘She was telling Connie to take it, and Connie didn’t want it. I tell you, I was quite embarrassed, as you are when your present in someone’s private conversation. They were getting pretty upset. Well, I didn’t know where to look, and I couldn’t go anywhere to give them any space – it was my shop! I had to stay near the counter. God knows what a customer would have thought if they’d come in!’
Cori, on today’s evidence, considered this an unlikely occurrence.
‘Next I knew they’d gone. “Bye, Chad,” she called out to me behind her as she hopped out onto the pavement. It was the last thing Isi said to me. I can still hear her saying it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.’
‘Anyway,’ resumed Grey, eager to move the narrative on, ‘the letter turned out not to be for Connie herself, but for Connie to pass to Isobel’s mother. It read that Isobel was tired of the town, and wanted to get away for a bit; that she was leaving awhile, and not to worry about her.’
‘Which is exactly what her mother did?’ presumed Cori.
‘You know, I’ve never worked out...’ This was Chad again, now lost in reverie, ‘whether Isobel was completely oblivious to her mother’s feelings, leaving her a silly little letter like that, not even taking it herself; or whether she knew full well how hard this would hit her parents and she ducked out of being there to face it?’
‘Well, maybe this new lead will mean something.’ Grey patted Chad on the shoulder as he put his empty cup down and eyed Cori meaningfully, ‘though please don’t get your hopes...’
‘You know, Inspector,’ continued Chad, completely missing the officers’ intention to leave, ‘I don’t know if she ever thought she’d be away as long as she has been. Now I think about it, now we know she never did call or write or anything. I mean, when she said goodbye she said it so casually, as if off on holiday, or staying with friends; a few weeks away, a break from her family. “Bye, Chad”, “Bye, Chad”, that was all she said...’
‘And that was that,’ continued Grey as they walked to the car. ‘We had her photos on the news and in the paper – even the nationals, although she never quite made it onto the covers. Half the town were out looking for her, putting up posters; and yet she was never seen again, at least not confirmed as such.’
‘Well, there might be something now though,’ offered Cori hopefully, ‘now we knew where Stephen Carman went, presuming she went with him. We could go through the file for old sightings in and around Nottingham, albeit unconfirmed at the time. And she never did call her mum?’
‘No, but then they were an odd family. They hardly got on at all it seems, by the time she left. But as soon as it was clear Isobel wasn’t coming straight back the parents panicked, as if it had been their fault. The mother was guilt-stricken.’
‘We could go and speak to her perhaps?’
‘Oh, Christine’s left town herself since. They separated eventually, the parents. And anyway, it isn’t that unusual. You’d think it was, but sometimes runaways just don’t get in touch, and with no good reason for it; and the longer it goes on the harder it is for them it seems. There are cases where a friend or relative has spent half a life as good as grieving for a missing loved one; when that person has turned up living under another name a town away, and knowing full well that they were loved and would be missed, no matter the troubles that sent them away.’
‘And the worry for the family gets worse the longer it goes on, I suppose.’
He answered, ‘A missing person can become a hole in the lives of those they leave behind, an aching question never answered: where? but mostly why?’
‘So,’ Cori summarised, they sitting now and talking in the car, ‘you started a file on Isobel mostly to appease the family?’
‘I prefer comfort the family.’
‘But it turned out that the case was worth worrying about?’
‘We thought it would be a “quick win”, as people say these days; but did we ever imagine she would never be found? That in itself became the mystery – we’d had no real reason to worry for her wellbeing before then.
‘And yet,’ he continued in his reflective tone, ‘perhaps here we have a clue to this mystery. For, look at Carman’s record: two counts of possession in as many years? That’s bad luck for a casual user; just about right for a dealer though, a canny one, who doesn’t keep much on h
im at any one time. Chad suspected they were dabbling even in their Southney days. And, as we see every day of our working lives, Cornelia, what better use has anonymity than the concealment of criminality?’
‘You mean his “trade” has forced her to be secretive?’
‘Well, it’s an idea.’
‘I’ll concede the point,’ she answered playfully. ‘It does spoil the image of Southney’s Snowdrop though.’
‘Yes, it rather scrunches it into the slush.’
‘And what a time for this lead to crop up, eh sir,’ Cori observed. ‘Right in the middle of the Long case.’
‘Incredible timing,’ he answered distractedly. ‘You could even say extraordinary.’
‘Could it be a coincidence? Isobel and Thomas?’
‘Only until we find the slightest link between them. But in the meantime we need concrete leads on Thomas.’
‘Let’s hope the phones have been ringing in our absence.’
As they pulled away from outside the record store, Cori reflected that there hadn’t been a single customer approach the shop the whole time they had been in there.
Chapter 12 – Back to the Station