Smoke and Mirrors Read Online Free PDF Page A

any idea where they could be?’
    Brian looked at him and, suddenly, his face seemed to collapse. He took off his glasses and wiped them. Tears ran down his cheeks.
    ‘They wouldn’t have run away,’ he said. ‘I was going to take them to the pantomime next week. They were looking forward to it.’
    ‘The pantomime? The one on the pier?
Aladdin
?’
    ‘Yes, it’s got that magician chappie in it. Max Mephisto. Have you heard of him?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Edgar. ‘I’ve heard of him.’
    ‘They say he can make a person disappear into thin air.’
    And he’s not the only one, thought Edgar.

Chapter 4
    Edgar arrived back at the station just as Bob and Emma appeared around the corner, heads down against the wind. It had actually stopped snowing but the wind was still whirling the flakes around as if it couldn’t decide on the correct place for them. Edgar watched his officers approach. Both had their hoods up, Bob in his absurd fisherman’s gear walking slightly ahead, Emma in her duffle coat following behind. There was something ecclesiastical about her hooded figure emerging through the snow. Appropriate really, considering that Bartholomew Square used to be the site of a monastery.
    ‘Did you leave the jeep on the race hill?’ Edgar asked Bob.
    ‘Yes, they’re still looking through the undergrowth there.’
    ‘Good.’ Edgar had sent his jeep to the park, to look again in the playground, shrubbery and formal garden. Usually they’d get the public to help with a search like this but the weather was making that impossible. The children’s parents and their friends were still combing the streets though, looking through gardens and outhouses, continuing to hope that somewhere the runaways would be found, cold and frightened but still alive. For Edgar, though he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, that hope had faded hours ago.
    ‘Let’s get inside,’ he said. ‘You look frozen.’
    ‘We’re OK,’ said Emma, whose nose was bright pink. ‘It’s quite bracing really.’
    ‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Bob. Edgar wondered whether he’d done the right thing in sending them off together.
    The subterranean CID offices, unbearable in summer, felt like an oasis of warmth. Someone made tea and they sat drinking it, clothes steaming, condensation forming on the walls. Bob munched slowly through his sandwiches. It was two o’clock.
    ‘Right,’ said Edgar. ‘What have we got?’
    Emma told him about the acting troupe.
    ‘It’s interesting that Annie wrote the plays even if they never actually put them on.’
    ‘Oh, they put them on all right.’ As succinctly as he could, he described the garage theatre.
    ‘That is perverted,’ said Bob, ‘building a place like that just to entice little kids in. He sounds like our man to me.’
    ‘There’s no “our man”,’ said Edgar irritably. ‘This isn’t a murder investigation.’ The ‘yet’ floated in the air. ‘And I didn’t think Brian Baxter was perverted. A little strange, certainly, a little obsessive. But he spoke about the children with real fondness.’
    ‘All the more reason to suspect him,’ said Bob, whose mind could be a dark place sometimes.
    ‘What about the shopkeeper, Sam Gee?’ said Edgar. ‘Did you talk to him again?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘He said that he didn’t see Annie and Mark on Monday. We managed to trace some other children who were in the shop and they hadn’t seen them either. Last sighting was on the corner of St Luke’s Terrace. They’re all a bit hazy about time but we think it was about five o’clock because they said the number 12 bus went past a few minutes later. I checked the timetable.’
    Once again, Edgar was impressed by Emma’s thoroughness. ‘Good work. What were the children doing in St Luke’s Terrace?’
    ‘Talking, somebody said. But someone else said that they may have been arguing.’
    ‘That’s interesting. Who said that?’
    Emma took out her notebook and flipped through