Murder At Midnight Page 3

  “Goddamnit, but you’re a hopeless pair of bloody blockheads. I suppose I’ll have to come down there and sort out the whole sorry mess myself.”

  The snow, which started hesitantly at first, gained momentum. Heavy swollen flakes clung tenaciously to everything they touched.

  Scott parked his car beside the bus stop where the real Lisa got off the bus on that fateful night so long ago. She had had a date with destiny that would not be denied.

  He and Ben scoured the entire area, both on foot and in the car, looking for the elusive Meg, but all in vain. Now, while they sat waiting for the arrival of Greg Mowatt, they passed the time by stamping their feet to try and keep warm.

  The unusual amount of driving around they had done, in a desperate attempt to locate the missing girl, had left Scott low on gas. So he was unable to keep the engine turned on to provide some much-needed heat.

  When Greg arrived, his face heavy as lead, they retraced their earlier efforts, scouring the surrounding area, street by street.

  The snow swirled around with all the energy of a spinning speed skater, leaving the sidewalks slippery and risky to walk on.

  “Nothing,” Greg muttered angrily, when they congregated once again beside the ill-fated bus stop. “Where the hell could that damned girl have gone?”

  “She hasn’t returned home yet either,” Scott said wearily. “I called her mother again. The poor woman’s worried sick.”

  “Shouldn’t we be calling the police?” Ben asked, looking pointedly at Greg.

  “Good God, we don’t want to bring these jerk-offs into this,” he snapped. His

  angry face now creased with worry lines.

  “Still,” Scott interjected quickly. “We can’t wait around here freezing our buns off all night. But at the same time, we can’t just go home and do nothing either.”

  “Look, something must have happened to Meg,” Ben insisted. “A girl alone in a deserted dark area like this.” He indicated the lonely streets and shuttered houses. “Well, it’s hardly safe. I mean has everyone forgotten what happened to Lisa?”

  “Now let’s not go jumping to conclusions,” Greg cautioned. “She may just be walking home, and it’s taking her longer with the snow.”

  “BS,” Ben retorted, emboldened by the urgency of the situation. “Even with a blizzard ten times as bad as this one, she would have still made it home ages ago. I vote that we call the police right away.”

  “Well if we don’t, Meg’s mother surely will,” Scott stated sensibly, ignoring Greg’s continued resistance to the idea. “I mean we’ve looked everywhere we can.”

  “Not quite,” Greg rasped, his heavy boot tracing an imperfect pattern in the snow. “Did anyone think of checking the spot where the Craig girl was found?”

  “Good God,” Scott exclaimed. “You really don’t believe that Lisa’s killer has murdered Meg as well?”

  Greg shrugged and raised a bushy eyebrow. “Given the circumstances, it’s possible I suppose. But there’s only one way to find out.”

  Roanoke Park lay silent beneath a fluffy blanket of fresh snow. The dark sky hovered above it devoid of moon or stars.

  The three men trudged through the trail, which led to the spot where Lisa had been found, brushing against the bristly arms of the evergreens. Scott had the uncanny feeling that the trees were trying to pull them into their leafy mysterious world, from whence there would be no return.

  “Over here,” Scott pointed in the direction of the azara bush, his breath freezing in the frigid air. In the near distance, he could make out the sinister contours of the Humpback Bridge.

  A profound, almost holy hush descended eerily on the snow-enshrouded world around them. As if it were holding its icy breath in anticipation of what was to come.

  “Oh God no…” Ben discovered her first. She lay sprawled on the frozen ground; flaming curls fanned round her face, the voluminous green cloak spread out like a sacrament around her.

  For several long minutes that stretched on like an eternity, nobody either spoke or moved. The three men just stood there in a state of stunned immobility, as the oppressive, unnatural stillness of that awful place held them fast in its grip. They were like spectators at a sacrificial altar of old, frozen into a state of horrified silence.

  A ghastly sense of déjà vu invaded their bones along with the numbing cold. This was the same place exactly, where another murdered girl had lain, precisely twenty years ago to the hour. But it was the gnawing sense of guilt, that they, no matter how unintentionally, were responsible for this young woman’s violent and lonely end that riddled them with a hellish kind of torment.

  “Oh my God,” Ben muttered at last, and wondered how something that started out as a harmless, although foolish re-enactment of a crime, could end up by duplicating it in such a terrible way?

  * * * *

  At that same moment, across town in an all night coffee shop, Slater sat wearily in a corner booth. He felt exhausted, and yet too tense to sleep. His workload had increased and now with the Craig case on top of it…well, it was really too much.

  The recent article in the Morning Herald had made the police department look like a bunch of incompetent idiots, and put him under even more pressure. God, he thought miserably, maybe they should just leave cold cases in the past where they belong?

  Yet despite himself, the Craig case began to gnaw at him like a determined rodent. Where was Lisa headed when she got off that bus? Who killed her, and why? She hadn’t been sexually assaulted, so that left out the theory of the crazed pervert who just happened by.

  He ordered more hot water for his tea, and watched a snow plough rumble by on the icy street. The morning commute would be treacherous.

  At times like these, when the pressures of the job really got to him, Slater would visit a curvy brunette named Charlotte. An amateur actress who played in minor theatre productions, alimony from a wealthy ex husband, was her main source of income.

  Slater called her on his cell. She sounded wide-awake, and as usual, delighted to hear from him. “You’re an incorrigible night owl,” he told her. “Don’t you know it’s 3:00 a.m.?”

  Charlotte owned a condo in False Creek with a stunning, up-close view of water, city and mountains. There was a marina practically in her backyard, and the Granville Street Market on her doorstep.

  She lounged in the jacuzzi with a glass of Scotch by her side. “Pour yourself a drink,” she invited. “Then come on in. The water’s hot.”

  It never failed to amaze him, how lucky he had been to find her. After too many sticky entanglements that turned nasty, this sort of no-strings, casual arrangement was almost too much to hope for. It was what most men dreamed of, but few attained.

  She soaped his back and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. “I’ve missed you,” she whispered. Slater reached over and switched off his cell phone. He didn’t want anything to disturb them while she showed him how much.

  * * * *

  Scott, staring transfixed at Meg’s ashen face, which rivalled the snow for paleness, thought at first he must have imagined it. Perhaps due to the intensity of his gaze, riveted for so long on such a freezing night on a sight so dreadful, or a mere trick of his frozen eyelids? But then it happened again, a faint movement of the girl’s head that lasted longer this time and left him without a doubt. “She’s alive…” he cried frantically. “Quick…it may not be too late…we might be able to save her…”

  * * * *

  Slater fixed Greg Mowatt with his most contemptuous glare. “How could you have been so bloody stupid?” he demanded. “Sending a young woman out alone at night in such a deserted and ill-fated place? And dressed up as a previous murder victim to boot, it’s utterly despicable…and ghoulish.”

  “Look here,” Greg’s tone rung with defiance. He had told Scott earlier, that Slater was just a two-bit copper with a God complex, and that he wasn’t about to take any flak from him. “If it hadn’t been for your goons stopping my reporter and photographe
r for running an amber light, none of this would have happened.”

  “It was a red light,” Slater fired back furiously. “Don’t you dare try to shift the blame.”

  They were gathered in Slater’s office; a heavy rain turning the snow to mush.

  “If I remember correctly, you asked us for help in solving this case; which your lot simply gave up on twenty long years ago,” Greg stated rudely. “Now you criticise everything we’ve done to try and bring the murderer to justice.”

  Slater took a deep breath in a visible effort to control his escalating anger, while Scott and Ben stared at the neutral ground offered by the courtyard fountain. The spiralling plume of water upstaged today, by nature’s very own display of aqua technics.

  “If you ever…ever get up to anything even remotely like this again, I’ll charge you with public mischief,” Slater threatened. “If Meg had died, you would be facing complicity charges. Who the hell do you think you are, playing about with a young woman’s life like that?”

  “Really? I wasn’t aware that our little re-enactment constituted a felony,” Greg brazened it out. “But I’ll run it past our lawyers to make sure of our legal footing in future. And,” he continued, on a roll and not about to give up the momentum. “If you lot were doing your job, the streets would be safe for everyone, at all times of the day and night.”

  * * * *

  “You have to hand it to Greg though,” Ben admitted grudgingly. “The old bastard doesn’t give an inch.”

  He and Scott were sharing a pizza at the Athens Gate restaurant. The unpleasant encounter in Slater’s office had left them both surprisingly hungry.

  “No, but he doesn’t know when to shut up either.”

  “I wonder if he plans another re-enactment, of this year’s re-enactment?” Ben smiled cynically.

  The rain had finally stopped, leaving a slick mirror of a road, which captured the blurred reflections of the neon signs and streetlights.

  “I somehow think that even the intrepid Greg won’t be trying something like that on again. At least not in the foreseeable future.” Scott predicted. “He felt just as pole-axed as we did by the way everything went so wrong. More so, in fact, because the ultimate responsibility lay with him.”

  “Well here’s to the old devil in any case,” Ben laughed wickedly, clinking his glass against Scott’s coffee cup.

  * * * *

  “Greg Mowatt should be ashamed of himself,” Violet declared. “If that poor girl had died, it would have been on his head.”

  A bright Saturday morning in late February, the window boxes at Granny’s Attic were colourful with crocuses, winter pansies and snowdrops.

  Scott unpacked a shipment from a recent estate sale. A pair of Staffordshire dogs, and a ship’s wheel carved from teak.

  “Oh, I daresay he would have managed to wiggle out of it somehow.” It had been all anyone had spoken of for weeks and he was growing tired of it.

  “How is Meg now?” she asked, applying wax to a small table.

  “Fine. In fact, she’s planning on returning to work on Monday.”

  Memories of that awful night were carved into his memory forever. They flashed unbidden whenever it was mentioned, and sometimes even when it wasn’t.

  He recalled how he and Ben immediately wrapped their coats around the freezing girl and carried her to Greg’s car. A light wind toyed with the feathery snowdrifts making then whisper and shift with a sweeping sigh.

  They bundled her into an old car blanket that Greg dug out from the back, and tried to breathe some warmth into her as they sped towards the hospital.

  “God, do you think she’s going to make it?” Ben whispered. He crossed himself and offered up a silent prayer.

  “How long did she actually lie out there?” Violet jolted Scott out of his reverie, with a suddenness that left him teetering between the past and present like a tipsy tightrope walker.

  “They don’t know exactly.”

  “But it was freezing that night, surely she couldn’t have been lying out there the whole time? Wouldn’t she have frozen to death?” Violet, far from being discouraged by her nephew’s lack of enthusiasm positively warmed to the subject. “I mean how long can a person survive out in the open, on a cold night like that?”

  “No-one really knows,” he said, trying not to remember how many times he had repeated this information during the last couple of weeks. During which time Violet had been on vacation, lapping up the sunshine in the Bahamas.

  “There was a case some years ago,” he explained. “Of a little girl who wandered outside her home in sub-zero temperatures, clad only in a night-dress. She remained there all night and was discovered in the morning lying half-frozen by the door. Yet she survived.”

  “Oh really?” Violet mused. “Then I guess we’re not as easily frozen as I thought.”

  Meg, suffering from hypothermia when rescued, had a nasty bump on the side of her head. The wound–– uncannily––in much the same place that Lisa Craig had been injured so many years before.

  “So what happened to her…exactly?” Violet stopped her polishing activities, so she wouldn’t miss any of the reply.

  “She doesn’t remember a thing.”

  “Amnesia?”

  Scott nodded. “You know I kept all the newspapers for you. So you can read all about it yourself, at your leisure.”

  “Oh but that’s not the same as hearing it from someone who was actually there,” she protested. “One of the principals at that!”

  Chapter Two

  “So how are we today?” Scott made a habit of dropping by Meg’s house on his way home from work. For ever since that fearful night, when he found her lying half-frozen in Roanoke Park, he couldn’t shake off the feeling of responsibility, for what had happened to her.

  “Well, we can’t complain, although perhaps we will in any case,” she replied in the same spirit.

  He sank into an armchair and stretched his legs towards the fire. Glancing at Meg as they chatted, he could still detect the likeness to Lisa Craig, even without the wig and cloak. Or perhaps, he reasoned, it wasn’t so much the features that were similar, but rather the air of vulnerability and total femininity.

  Be careful, a little voice warned. This could be dangerous if you get too attached.

  “Anything come back to you today?” he asked, referring to her loss of memory following the awful events of February fourth.

  She shook her head. “Not a thing. All I can remember is getting off the bus at that lonely stop. When I didn’t see you guys around, I walked slowly in the direction of Lisa’s home, waiting for you to catch up.”

  She took a ragged breath.

  “My very last memory is of approaching Roanoke Park. It was starting to snow and it looked bleak and very spooky looming above me, and that’s it.”

  “Until,” Scott finished for her. “You woke up in a hospital bed with a nasty concussion, hypothermia, and a slight frostbite.”

  Meg nodded, pulling her sweater closer around her.

  The specialist had told her that she might regain her memory gradually; it might come back all at once; or it might never return at all.

  But Scott knew he wasn’t the only person keenly interested in Meg’s memory loss, or rather her ability to regain it. Half the reading public was avid for any news, the gorier the better. While the Police Department, in the person of Neil Slater was also intensely concerned about what had happened to Meg, and hopeful that by solving this most recent mystery, they might get the answer to the Craig case as well.

  Then there was another individual. The person, or persons, who had attacked Meg as she walked past Roanoke Park dressed as Lisa Craig, and left her for dead. Their panic when they found out that she was still alive must have been considerable. This would be followed by at least a temporary relief when they learned that she had amnesia. But what would happen if, or when, her recollection of that frightful night returned?

  Was that a chance they could afford t
o take?

  Or, would they seek to silence her forever?

  These disturbing questions, and others, sped around in Scott’s mind like an unforgiving carousel. Slater too, recommended that Meg should never be left alone, and suggested a spell of protective custody, which the young woman had vetoed.

  “I won’t live like a prisoner,” she stated firmly. But she did agree to have someone with her at all times, at least until the present danger had passed.

  The only way to help Meg, Scott decided, was to dig around as much as possible in the old unsolved Craig case. He was convinced that Lisa’s killer and Meg’s attacker were one and the same.

  He intended to start with Garrick Boyd, the prime suspect in the case. He had tried to interview the surly realtor a couple of years ago, but he had literally slammed the door in his face. Now his whereabouts were unknown.

  * * * *

  The receptionist at Mitford Realty had a brightly painted face and abrupt manner. “We have no information whatever on the whereabouts of Mr. Boyd,” she recited, with all the imagination of a trained parakeet. It seemed that numerous inquiries over the years about the prime suspect in the Craig murder, had left the staff at Mitford exasperated and decidedly uncooperative.

  The nameplate on her desk announced Roxanne Kaye in bold letters, intertwined with rosebuds.

  “Well thank you Ms. Kaye for all your friendly assistance,” Scott said sarcastically. There was more than one way to skin a cat.

  “Her name is Roxanne, she’s fifty, trying to look twenty, and I want you to charm what you can out of her.”

  “Well hey,” Ben said, as he developed a roll of film in his darkroom. “I never could resist older women.”

  Meanwhile, Scott kept busy with a line of enquiry of his own. He contacted the Real Estate Licensing Board to find out if Garrick Boyd was still employed as an agent. But they had no record of him. “We have several Boyds registered, including a Henry, Patrick, Marvin and Darryl, but no Garrick I’m afraid.”

  Perhaps he changed his name, Scott thought? But to what, that was the million-dollar question?