14. THE IMAGE OF A GIRL

THE FANCY DRESS BALL (14)

“Well,” said Cynthia slowly, thoughtfully, “when the Tiffany story blew up all those years ago it struck me as particularly poignant because I could see a shadow of the poor girl in you, Jessica. The same smile, I think, made me want to dry my eyes out for Tiffany. But you weren’t her! Of course you weren’t! While the police were putting goodness knows how man man hours into finding her, and Roger here was doing his damnedest to bring them to justice, I was tucking you up in bed and telling you, both of you, just how much I loved you. Now you’re saying that Roger killed her!”

Still being held in what must have been a vice-like grip by her sister, Jessica’s eyes smouldered.

“I know he did,” she said, “I was told. And I believed it because the man who told me is a priest!”

That shocked me. I’ve never had much truck with the clergy, but I’ve never met one who comes out with deliberate lies, though I dared say a lot of what many of them believe wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny by the gods of truth.

“I don’t think I even know a priest,” I said quietly, “but I don’t believe there are many of them who deliberately misinform young women when it comes to stories about people who are currently alive as opposed to those who are supposedly long dead!”

“What priest was it, Jessica?” asked her mother, “I don’t think we know of any priest who would say anything as ridiculous as that! And if you must know, Roger is the most peace-loving man I’ve ever met!”

“He still killed Tiffany,” insisted Jessica obstinately, “everyone knows it! The man who wrote all those articles about the girl was the one who killed her, and it was Roger who got his five minutes of fame splashing the story everywhere he could.”

I don’t know how much longer the absurd argument would have continued with Jessica insisting that I was a child killer, but the door behind Dakota was nudged open and the whinnying sound that came in reminded us that Trigger was still outside, no doubt wondering what on Earth was going on.

It was the brief distraction that gave Jessica an opportunity to pull herself free, and seeing that she was outnumbered make a dash for freedom. At first we didn’t know but then it became clear that she had mounted the horse and was off on it.

“She’s gone,” sighed Dakota, “I don’t know where she got her daft ideas from. We’re both at the same university but we do totally different courses and hardly see each other, not even at meal times. We sort of have our own groups of friends.”

“Is there a priest anywhere near her?” I asked. I was troubled by what she had said about being influenced by a priest because I know one thing about members of the clergy: they’re very good at spinning yarns and those yarns don’t even have to have a foot in the real world.

Dakota shook her head. “Not that I know,” she said, and she looked at Cynthia. “Mum, this has got serious,” she said, “people have been killed. Lies have been told and Jessica has been brainwashed, from what I can see. And what does she know about the missing child, Tiffany?”

I sighed. It was time for the truth to come out, a truth that I’d rather hoped would be kept hidden until all memory of the events surrounding it had been forgotten. But the Tiffany story just wouldn’t die,

“There was no real child,” I said slowly, “I know that I harped on back then about how the child’s parents were torn by grief, and the parents of a child called Tiffany were. But it wasn’t the image that was published in the papers.

“Who was it then?” demanded Dakota.

“Let me explain,” I said, needing to put things in order so that she would understand and not go off at half c**k like her twin had. “There was a criminal organisation with crooked fingers in every pie, so to speak. They were a vague, amorphous group that included major politicians in their numbers. That was the dangerous part, and while it was shapeless but going about its nasty business, and that business included murder, prostitution, even kidnapping young girls and selling then into slavery, it was just a shadowy affair without form or shape. Just a wide-ranging criminal gang consisting of wrong doers from every walk of life, including the church and politicians, though truth to tell not many politicians are that rotten despite what you might think!”

“I know,” nodded Dakota, “it was called Tiffany.”

I shook my head. “Not at first,” I told her, “it managed very well having nobody at its apparent head, but it was getting ever larger and into more and more crimes. Nobody dared challenge it because nobody knew who to actually challenge. And one day around the time it really annoyed me for personal reasons, and with the press at a standstill, unable to focus on anything tangible, I decided it must be down to me.”

“What personal reasons?” demanded Dakota.

I sighed. “I’ll tell you, then,” I said, “and I want you to understand that I was under tremendous personal pressure. I was married back then, to Rosalind. I loved her dearly, but things started to go wrong when our daughter was born, I suppose around the same time as you were born, Dakota. But all was not well with her. She was terribly handicapped and all the medics sighed and shook their heads and told us she wouldn’t live for too long. And she didn’t. When she was seven she died, all alone in her bed one night, and when that happened her mum and I decided that her brief life must not be wasted. Even in death she could be valued.”

“How would you do that?” asked Cynthia.

“It was at the time when the country was being flooded with dangerous drugs because there was an awful lot of money to be made from disillusioned youngsters who wanted to get away from reality. The shadowy criminal gang I was on about was behind it, importing copious quantities and passing the stuff on to dealers, and not one fo them was bothered about the purity of the stuff. The death rate of teens who got hooked on the poison began to rise and the government, with ministers actually involved in the rotten trade, failed to do anything about it.”

“And where did your poor dead baby come into this?” asked Cynthia.

“She was christened, soon after she was born, as Tiffany. Tiffany Peterson, though in all her few years she never once learned to say that name. But I used her name to try to reach the hearts and minds of parents who might need to care.”

“And she looked like our Jessica, my sister?” asked Dakota.

“The image in the press and on posters everywhere, was of a child called Tiffany, but the photo was one of your sister, Jessica. Her dad, your father too, Dakota, gave me the go-ahead because he was as bothered about the soaring crime rate as was anyone She became Tiffany, though she never knew it And it can be said that when I decided that enough was enough I stopped using her image. It vanished from the media. It might even be said that I killed Tiffany.”

© Peter Rogerson 31.07.20