End in Tears by Ruth Rendell Page B

nothing, only looked at him, hoping he would smile, which suddenly he did.
    â€œCome along, Sarge,” he said. “There’s a pub down the road called the Lamb and Flag. I’m going to take you in there and buy you a drink.”
    Â 
    He was thinking about going home. Sylvia was coming over, leaving the boys with a sitter. His conscience troubled him over their last meeting. He had been unkind to her (though not as unkind as her mother) and nothing she had done or meant to do excused that. When he saw her he meant to make it up to her, not changing his point of view, of course, but being gentler and more sympathetic. He should be flattered, he should be proud, he told himself, that his daughters actually took notice of what he said. Other people’s daughters, as far as he could see, paid no attention whatever to their fathers’ views.
    The temperature was falling. He went to the window and looked down across Kingsmarkham to the west where the drooping sun was sinking through narrow bands of cloud that were almost black. A flock of starlings rose from the water meadows by the Kingsbrook and sailed in perfect formation across the treetops. He heard the door behind him open and turned to see Burden.
    â€œI was thinking of going home,” he said.
    â€œYou may think again when I tell you. A girl’s gone missing. She’s twenty-one, works in that souvenir shop in the High Street—Gew-Gaws is it called?—lives with her boyfriend in a flat over the shop. She’s called Megan Bartlow.”
    â€œBartlow, Bartlow…Where have I heard that name before? It was somewhere quite recently…”
    Burden ignored him. “We’ve no reason to think there’s any connection between her and Amber Marshalson. This Bartlow girl may just turn up unharmed. It’s a dodgy sort of setup, no one knowing exactly when she went missing or where she might have gone or even if she’s just run off with another chap. The boyfriend and the mother are downstairs. They came in to report her missing. I don’t know if you’ll want to—”
    â€œI’ve remembered,” Wexford interrupted him. “Bartlow—it’s not a common name. You were wrong about our having no reason to connect her with Amber Marshalson. She had two friends who were sisters. Lara and Megan Bartlow.”

CHAPTER 11
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    R ather than one of the bleak interview rooms, Sergeant Camb had put them into Kingsmarkham police station’s newly set-up “family room.” This offspring of the caring society, to use Wexford’s own words for it, had been born of an idea of Hannah Goldsmith’s and enthusiastically taken up by the Chief Constable. A former repository of lost property, it measured no more than twelve feet by ten and had only one small casement window, but it made up for what it lacked in space and ventilation by its cheerful furnishings. The hard-wearing cord carpet was a rich emerald green, each of the three small armchairs was a different primary color and the fourth striped blue and yellow. A painting large enough to cover one wall almost entirely was a coral and crimson medley Wexford described as looking like a butcher’s block at closing time on a Saturday night. He had suggested to the Chief Constable that the council-tax payers of Kingsmarkham should be offered a tour of the place, seeing that they had paid for it. For a moment he thought he had been taken seriously.
    He found Megan Bartlow’s boyfriend and her mother sitting side by side, he in the yellow chair, she in the red one, facing the picture across a white plastic table laden with very old color supplements from Sunday newspapers. Neither of them had disturbed the neat stack, which still looked the way it had when the family room was opened by a celebrity (a local man who now played for Manchester City) eleven weeks before. The two appeared to be much the same age, late forties. Megan’s