by J F Straker
On Tuesdays and Fridays Tom Holden held both morning and evening surgeries at the medical centre in Limpsted which he shared with three other doctors, and he did not return home for lunch, and on those days during term time, with Natalie and Victor away at boarding schools, Frances was content with a light snack at midday. But not in the holidays. In the holidays the children needed a proper lunch. What they did not need and did not want was regimentation, and she tried to make lunch times elastic to suit their plans. On that particular August Friday they had gone for a long walk with the dogs through Rye Woods and up past Holland Farm and, caught in the heavy rain, had returned home later than expected and drenched to the skin. While they bathed and changed Frances gave the dogs a good towelling. It was after one-thirty when the family eventually sat down to lunch.
They were eating lemon mousse when the telephone rang. Natalie, who was nearest the door, pushed back her chair. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.
The telephone was in the hall. They could hear her voice but not the words. When she returned she said, ‘It’s Miss Marsh. She says her meal hasn’t arrived.’
‘It hasn’t?’ Frances looked at her watch. ‘Goodness! It’s after two. Someone must have had a breakdown. Tell her—no, leave it, darling. I’ll talk to her.’
She had joined the Meals on Wheels service five years previously, on the entreaty of a friend who was then running the service. Three years later she had been persuaded to take temporary charge while the friend went into hospital and, when the friend failed to recover from her operation, had reluctantly agreed to continue in charge. With so many other commitments she would have preferred that someone else should take over. But no one else had offered and she had found herself stuck with it.
Miss Marsh lived in one of the council flats on the Glendale estate, north of West Deering, and was calling from the pay telephone installed for the benefit of the tenants. Usually the food arrived sometime between twelve-thirty and one-fifteen, she told Frances, depending on who was delivering it, and she would have rung earlier had not the rain been so heavy. ‘It’s some distance from the flat,’ she explained, ‘and I didn’t want to get wet. My rheumatism, you see. But it’s stopped now, thank goodness!’
Frances expressed sympathy. ‘We’ll get something to you as soon as we can,’ she promised. ‘Even if it’s only a sandwich.’
‘I’m not paying sixty-five pee for a sandwich,’ Miss Marsh said.
‘No, of course not. Don’t worry, Miss Marsh, you’ll get your meal. But it may have to be in the evening. It depends, you see, on what’s gone wrong.’
‘No meat, then,’ Miss Marsh warned. ‘Not at night, it keeps me awake. So does cheese. It’ll have to be fish.’
Frances was tempted to retort that she was not running a restaurant, that the menu was table d’hôte and not à la carte. Instead she promised to bear the warning in mind. ‘Do you know if Mrs Golding is also waiting for her meal?’ she asked. Mrs Golding was the other customer in the flats.
Miss Marsh did not know. Frances rang off and checked her list of helpers and dates. Elizabeth Doyle. She rang the Manor and waited impatiently while the ringing tone went on and on and on. When eventually Andrew answered the call his speech was slurred and he sounded distrait and she realized with surprise that he was the worse for drink. Most untypical, she thought. No, Andrew said, Elizabeth was not at home. Neither was her car, nor the food she and Mrs Trotter had been preparing when he had gone out some time after eleven. So presumably she was still out delivering the meals. She should have completed the round long before this, Frances told him, and asked to speak to his father. Sorry, Andrew said, Dad’s away for the weekend. There’s only me here. Shall I ask Elizabeth to ring you when she returns? Please, Frances said. And rang off.
Only three people who used the Meals on Wheels service were on the telephone. She rang them all, and all said their meals had been delivered around the usual time. Old Mr Philipson was the most helpful. Mrs Doyle had left the cottage shortly after one o’clock, he said, remarking that she still had two more calls to make. Miss Marsh and Mrs Golding, Frances thought—which implied that Elizabeth had travelled the circuit anti-clockwise. But what had happened to her after leaving Philipson’s cottage? From there it was less than two miles to the Glendale estate if one went by Yellham Lane, only slightly longer via the village. Had her car broken down or been involved in an accident? In either case surely Elizabeth would have contacted her, or asked someone else to do so. Which seemed to leave her somewhere in Rye Woods, perhaps lying immobilized with a broken leg or ankle—unconscious, even—after having tripped and fallen as she made her way back to the car.
It was an unhappy possibility demanding prompt action. A more pressing situation, as she explained to the children, than the possible hunger of Miss Marsh and Mrs Golding. ‘I’ll get the car out and try to find her,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you two could cut some sandwiches, eh? Ham—cheese—there’s both in the fridge. I’ll deliver them when I get back.’
‘We could take them,’ Victor said. ‘On our bikes. I mean, you might be some time, mightn’t you?’
‘You wouldn’t mind? It’s over three miles to the estate. Nearly four.’
‘That’s nothing,’ Victor said. ‘Off you go, Mum. Leave it to us.’
The dogs followed her out to the car. Not this time, she told them. Soda was reasonably docile on his own, happy to curl up on the back seat. Whisky, however, insisted on being in front, preferably on a passenger’s lap, from where he had a better view through the windscreen of what lay ahead. But the sight of another dog sent him berserk. He would bound about the car, barking and growling; and Soda, always the copycat, would join in. If Elizabeth Doyle had met with an accident and had to be ferried home or to hospital, a couple of rampaging terriers was something she could do without.
She drove directly to the track that led to Philipson’s cottage. The gate was open and she bumped her way across the field to the wood, confident that that was where Elizabeth’s car would be. But it was not. And if the car had gone then presumably so had Elizabeth. Which made a further search of the woods superfluous. So had she got it wrong? Frances wondered. She had assumed that Elizabeth had followed an anti-clockwise circuit, visiting the houses in order. But perhaps Elizabeth did not work that way. Cheryl Mason, for instance, made Philipson’s cottage her final call, on the pretext that the time spent in walking there and back through the woods allowed the food in the remaining hot-boxes to cool—although according to general belief the true reason was that it allowed her more time with the old man in which to render services unconnected with Meals on Wheels. Perhaps Elizabeth too had her own particular routine. Philipson’s information that she had left him with just two calls to make seemed to belie that. But the old man could be mistaken. Frances drove slowly round the circuit, checking that each of the customers had had a meal delivered and keeping a sharp look-out for Elizabeth’s car. She even drove up Yellham Lane and back through West Deering village. It was all to no avail. There was no sign of Elizabeth and no sign of her car.
She returned home to find the children awaiting her, having cut and delivered the sandwiches. A further call to the Manor elicited the information from Andrew, now sounding listless but sober, that Elizabeth still had not returned. To Frances the situation seemed crazy, incomprehensible. Why would Elizabeth drive off into the blue, so to speak, with two meals still undelivered? A sudden, inexplicable rebellion against what she was doing? It would be untypical of the public face of Elizabeth, but who knew the private face? An act of mercy? Driving a sick or injured person, perhaps someone with whom her car had been in collision, to hospital in Limpsted, and then too shaken by the incident to drive home? Elizabeth was not one to be easily shaken. And would she not at least have contacted Andrew?
Neither Frances nor the children could find a satisfactory answer to the problem. At six-fifteen they took fish fingers and peas and chips, with tinned fruit for a sweet, to Miss Marsh and Mrs Golding, and
were told by the former that she could not possibly be expected to digest fried food at night—a complaint that for once failed to evoke sympathy in Frances. It was a relief for all three when Tom arrived home and they could put the mystery to him. ‘This is for the police,’ Tom said, after yet another unproductive call to the Manor. ‘If Philipson was right about the time she left him she’s been missing for over six hours. I’m surprised Andrew hasn’t been on to them already.’
‘Andrew and his stepmother aren’t on the same wavelength,’ Victor said. ‘I don’t think he’d be bothered if she’d gone for good.’
‘That’s unkind, Victor,’ Frances said. ‘And I’m sure it isn’t true.’
‘I’m not,’ Tom said, ‘but no matter. I’ll ring Pearson.’ Pearson was the local constable. ‘Let him sort it out.’
‘Pearson’s on holiday,’ Victor said. ‘In Spain.’
‘Is he? Oh! Well, in that case—’
‘Why not try Mr Hasted?’ Frances suggested. ‘He could be home.’
‘Good thinking. Yes, I’ll do that.’
At five feet eight inches Detective Inspector George Hasted was short for a policeman, but what he lacked in height he gained in breadth. He was a real bull of a man with a thick neck and large hands and feet and heavy thighs. Bronzed and bearded, his bushy, wayward brows above intense grey-green eyes gave him a rather fierce appearance which was belied by a quiet, almost gentle voice that hardened into anger only under extreme provocation. A member of the county CID and stationed at its headquarters in Limpsted, for the past four years he had lived with his wife Sybil and his small son Jason in West Deering; and if, because of his profession, he had not yet become fully integrated into the community, he was liked and respected. There were no reservations in their acceptance of his wife. Young and pretty and gregarious, within a year she had joined the Women’s Institute and the Young Wives Guild. She helped with the local play group and was Secretary of the West Deering Bonfire Society. Had it not been that she was now nearly nine months pregnant she would have been playing that summer for the village stoolball club.
The Holdens were drinking after-dinner coffee when Hasted arrived. Frances lifted Smudge off an armchair for the inspector to sit, tried unsuccessfully to curb the exuberant welcome of the dogs, gave him coffee and told him of the bizarre disappearance of Elizabeth Doyle. And Hasted listened. He liked the Holdens. Tom Holden was Sybil’s doctor, a kind and caring man, and he admired Frances’s unbounded service to the community. He did not know the children well, but he knew they were popular. At 15, Natalie was similar to her mother in appearance, and possessed of the same lively outlook. Victor was a year older. Darker and thicker, with an incipient moustache that he fingered constantly, he was the quieter and more serious of the two.
‘Constable Pearson’s on holiday,’ Tom said, when Frances had finished on a question mark. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘I’m glad you did,’ Hasted said. ‘I gather you’ve no solution to suggest?’
‘None,’ Frances said. ‘I mean, she isn’t the sort of person to go off like that on the spur of the moment. She’s so—well, so organized.’
‘Have you checked the hospitals?’
‘She isn’t in Limpsted General,’ Tom said. ‘I checked there.’
‘She drives a Fiat, doesn’t she?’
‘A Mirafiori estate,’ Victor said. ‘A red one.’
‘Do you happen to know the number?’
‘I’ve got it here,’ Frances said. She handed him a form Elizabeth had completed after a previous Meal on Wheels journey. ‘I guessed you’d want it.’
Hasted made notes. ‘On the face of it an accident looks unlikely,’ he said. ‘We’d have heard of it by now. So all we can do is put out a general call for the car.’
‘If she’s been driving for over six hours she could be miles away by now,’ Tom said.
‘Yes. In which case it’s no concern of the police. Not if she’s missing of her own free will.’ Hasted looked down at his feet, where Whisky lay on his back with his legs in the air, and gently massaged the dog’s stomach with the sole of his shoe. ‘You say Mr Doyle is away. Do you know if he’s been notified?’
‘I suggested it to Andrew,’ Tom said. ‘I imagine he has.’
‘I’m worried about Andrew,’ Frances said. ‘The poor boy is there on his own. We should at least have asked him over for a meal.’
‘I daresay he’ll manage, Mrs Holden,’ Hasted said. He stood up, carefully avoiding the dog, who made no attempt to move. ‘Young people do. But I’ll check.’
‘You’ll be seeing him?’
‘I’ll call in on my way home.’
‘Good,’ Frances said. ‘You’ll let us know if there’s anything he needs, won’t you? And if he’d prefer to spend the night here, tell him we’d be glad to have him.’
She went with Hasted to the front door and, out of hearing of the children, warned him that he might find Andrew somewhat under the weather; she suspected the boy had had too much to drink at midday, she said, and although he had sounded sober when she spoke to him later he might not have recovered fully from the effects. At 18 he was unlikely to be accustomed to heavy drinking, and certainly she had never known it happen before.
Hasted found him pale but sober. No, Andrew said, he had no idea where his stepmother might have gone. Yes, she had had several letters that morning, but none had appeared to awaken any particular reaction. Apart from her annoyance that his father had failed to warn her he would be away that weekend there had been nothing untoward in her manner or behaviour. No, he said, he had not contacted his father, for the simple reason that although he knew his father was spending the weekend with friends in Winchester, he knew neither the friends’ names nor their address.
‘He did mention the name at breakfast, I think,’ Andrew said. ‘But he was talking to my stepmother and I wasn’t really listening. I’ve searched through the telephone index, but there’s no Winchester number and none of the names listed rings a bell.’
‘Does your father keep an address book?’
‘I don’t know. If he does it would be in his desk, and he keeps that locked.’ They were in the large living room, talking above the sound of music on the television set. The music swelled in volume and Andrew switched it off. ‘Would you like a beer, Mr Hasted?’
‘No thanks, Andrew. I take it you’ve never met these friends.’
Andrew shook his head. ‘I’ve never met any of my father’s friends. Not the distant ones. They don’t come down here.’
Sad, Hasted reflected. ‘Is there any chance your father might ring this evening?’ he asked. ‘Most couples like to keep in touch when they’re apart.’
Andrew’s pale face twisted in a wry smile. An ascetic face, Hasted thought, with those large, deep-set dark eyes and the thin lips and the high cheek bones, framed in a mass of dark curly hair. Somehow the face did not seem to fit the body, which was broad and muscular and would probably thicken with age. According to Sybil, who was a mine of information on the youth of the village, most of the local girls thought him aloof and rather dull. Others, and Patricia Scott in particular, really fancied him.
‘They’re not that sort of a couple, I’m afraid,’ Andrew said. ‘But it’s not important, is it? I mean, you don’t really think anything’s happened to her, do you? There’s been no report of an accident, has there?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ Hasted said. ‘But disappearing like this without warning—and in the middle of delivering Meals on Wheels—you wouldn’t call that normal behaviour, would you?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘So we must look for the abnormal. Have you a photograph of your stepmother?’
‘I expect so.’ Andrew crossed to a corner table and began to leaf through an album. ‘Not many, though. She didn’t like being photographed.’ He selected a print. ‘Will this do?’
Hasted nodded. The photograph depicted a group of people on the Manor lawn, wit
h Elizabeth Doyle looking typically smart in a white linen suit. The Scotts were there, and the Holdens, and the vicar and his wife. The only member of the group Hasted did not recognize was a middle-aged man in typical city dress, who stood on the fringe.
‘We can blow it up,’ he said. ‘Who’s the city gent?’
‘Elizabeth’s solicitor. The London one.’
Hasted pocketed the photograph. ‘Now, how about you, Andrew? All right here on your own, are you? Mrs Holden said to tell you you’re welcome to a meal or a bed at their place.’
He was fine, Andrew said. And should he not stay home in case his stepmother returned? Or she might ring. So, just conceivably, might his father. Hasted agreed, and asked him to concentrate on trying to recall the name of his father’s friends. ‘Let me know if you do,’ he said. ‘Anytime.’
It was after nine-thirty by the time he got home, and although he had eaten before visiting the Holdens he was hungry. But then, as Sybil said, he was always hungry. He telephoned a report on the missing woman to Central Control—‘It’s not really our pigeon—there’s no evidence of accident or crime—but there are unusual aspects that make it interesting’—and as he ate the omelette Sybil had hastily prepared for him they discussed Elizabeth Doyle and her husband.
‘There’s never been a hint of scandal concerning her, has there?’ Hasted asked. ‘Another man, I mean.’