Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

A recipient of the 2003 Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Crime Writers Association, Robert Barnard continues to write at the top of his form. His latest novel to see print in the U.K. is The Killing in Jubilee Terrace (Allison & Busby, January). We have several more of his delightfully acerbic stories in inventory, for publication later this year, including a Mozart story from the series he writes as Bernard Bastable.

* * *

“You must be very worried,” said Inspector Paulson.

“Worried? ’Course I’m worried. Worried sick.” The elderly woman picked another Malteser from the bright red bag. “I was always telling her, but it made no difference. Just won’t listen, young people.”

“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.