by Hazel Holt
‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘it certainly is very strange.’
Mrs Wilmot seized upon this rather fatuous remark as if I had said something quite original.
‘Yes, it is, very strange. Quite inexplicable, in fact.’
I suddenly thought of something.
‘Her sister, up in Scotland, is very ill. Surely she must have gone up there to see her!’
‘Mrs Douglas telephoned them. They’ve had no word either. Well, there was a letter to her sister a few weeks ago, just a short note. and that’s all.’
‘Oh.’ I felt deflated. ‘Have the police put her on their missing persons list? Are they looking for her?’
‘Well, of course, in view of her age they have to take it seriously. But, as the Inspector pointed out, she did go off of her own volition, nobody kidnapped her or anything. And it isn’t as if she’s senile. I mean, she’s perfectly aware of what she’s doing and if, as he said, she chooses to go away, that’s her business. It’s all very awkward. She could have lost her memory or anything.’
‘I suppose people do,’ I said doubtfully, ‘though I’ve never actually come across anyone who has.’
‘Anyway,’ Mrs Wilmot continued, ‘after her most recent check-up Dr Hughes said that she was quite fit.’
‘Thelma seemed to think that her angina was serious,’ I said.
‘Oh dear me, no. Just a slight murmur, he said. I was surprised that Mrs Douglas made so much of it. A lot of our residents lead quite active lives with much worse heart conditions.’
‘If she had been taken ill you or the police would certainly have heard by now. But it really is unlike her to have gone off without telling you.’
‘That’s what I told the Inspector. Such a considerate person Mrs Rossiter always was.’
I noticed that Mrs Wilmot was speaking of her in the past tense.
‘I’m sure there must be some perfectly rational explanation of it all,’ I said. ‘Elderly ladies don’t just disappear into thin air!’
‘Well, Mrs Rossiter certainly seems to have done so,’ Mrs Wilmot said sharply and I realised what a difficult situation it must be for her.
‘Have the police seen the taxi driver, Ed Cooper?’ I asked. ‘I know him quite well, actually. He’s a very nice man – he does some driving for the hospital service.’
‘Well, I dare say he’s perfectly respectable, but it was unfortunate that she couldn’t get Mr Simpson; such a reliable man, we always use him when we can. But all this man Cooper could tell them was that he took Mrs Rossiter into Taunton and dropped her off in Church Square. He asked if she wanted him to wait for her, to take her back, but she said that she’d get the bus. She often did that – she said she liked the ride. The bus goes the long way, round through the villages and she used to say she enjoyed seeing places she used to know. I must say I can’t stand bus journeys myself, all that stopping and starting. But Mrs Rossiter had some funny little ways.’
There was a tap on the door and Ivy came in.
‘Please, Mrs Wilmot, Mr Palgrave has had one of his turns again and Lily thinks you ought to call Dr Randall.’
Mrs Wilmot gave an exclamation of annoyance. ‘As if I hadn’t got enough to cope with at the moment!’
I got up to go. ‘Please do let me know the minute there’s any news.’
‘Yes, of course.’
She was already at the telephone and spoke absently.
I went along to Mrs Jankiewicz’s room, eager to hear what she had to say. But she was in a difficult mood, irritable and disinclined to discuss the matter.
‘A great upheaval – everything is disorganised since Tuesday. Police everywhere talking to people, poking and prying into her life. Is her own affair.’
‘But something awful may have happened to her.’
‘Perhaps – perhaps not.’
She continued to complain about various minor disruptions and I saw that she didn’t want to talk. I was used to her moods and I thought that it might be one of the days when she was in a lot of pain. It also occurred to me that she must be upset and missing Mrs Rossiter, who was her only friend at West Lodge, very badly.
‘I won’t stay now,’ I said, ‘but I’ll pop back tomorrow and see if there’s any news.’ Mrs Jankiewicz smiled grimly. ‘I will be here.’ she said.
Outside in the corridor a sudden thought crossed my mind and I went up the stairs to Mrs Rossiter’s room. I looked up and down the passage but there was no one about. The staff no doubt were all busy with poor Mr Palgrave and his nasty turn. Rather nervously I tried the door, found it was unlocked and slipped into the room, closing it cautiously behind me. The room looked just as it always did; nothing seemed to have been moved. I went over to the desk and pulled open the top drawer. There was no cache of sleeping tablets. I tried all the other drawers but they weren’t anywhere. On an impulse I went over to the wardrobe and looked inside. As far as I could tell all her clothes were there.
I heard a movement in the passage outside and froze, but the footsteps passed. Thoroughly unnerved, I opened the door slightly and saw a figure with two walking sticks at the end of the corridor. Feeling like someone in a thriller, I slipped out of the room, down the stairs and into the street, where I stood trembling slightly with mixed feelings of guilt and exhilaration.
I went and leaned on the harbour wall to get my breath back (I felt as if I had been holding it for the last five minutes) and considered what I had found. Or, rather, not found. Had Mrs Rossiter thrown the tablets away? This seemed unlikely in view of the fact that she had kept them so carefully for what must have been several weeks. But if she had taken them with her? Then the implications were dreadful.
The tide was out and the small sailing dinghies and larger motor boats leaned sideways in the mud of the harbour. Early holiday-makers sat on benches outside the Pier public house, or sat on the sea wall eating ice-creams. Everything looked so normal – it seemed impossible to think that somewhere Mrs Rossiter was dead. But that’s nonsense, I told myself. If she had taken the sleeping tablets, her body would have been found by now. And yet ... she could have bought a bottle of whisky in Taunton, taken a bus to one of the villages and walked up through the woods. She knew the area well. Parts of the Quantocks are very remote; a body could remain undiscovered for a long time.
A family group, a young mother, father and small child, passed me, the child scampering in front of his parents who chased him, laughing. Why would she kill herself? She had seemed sad when I saw her last, depressed, perhaps after her flu. It might have been that she saw no point in going on, living at West Lodge, gradually sinking into helplessness and dependency like the other old people there. Whatever affection she might have had for Thelma had been gradually eroded by her daughter’s selfishness and indifference; her son was far away, her sister dying. Wouldn’t it be better to go while one still had one’s faculties, before old age took away the final pleasures that made life bearable? Had Mrs Rossiter made the ultimate choice?
It occurred to me that Mrs Jankiewicz must have made the same deductions. She knew about the sleeping tablets; she knew that Mrs Rossiter had been depressed. Perhaps that was why she had been so moody today, hardly liking to voice such terrible thoughts, even to me. I simply didn’t know what to do. If she had already taken the tablets then nothing I could tell anyone would do any good. But suppose she was still making up her mind, sitting in some hotel room, screwing up her courage – what then?
I stood there for a long time, seeing but not seeing the life going on around me. Eventually I left the harbour and walked back along the promenade. All her life Mrs Rossiter had been subject to the will of other people. It seemed only right that she should make this final decision for herself.
Chapter Four
After a few days of cold and rain I woke up one morning to brilliant sunshine and decided that I could put off no longer the tiresome business of bathing the dogs. Tris, my West Highland terrier, actively dislikes water so I do him first while I sti
ll feel quite strong. Tessa, as befits a spaniel, enjoys the water but thinks the whole thing is a delightful game and usually contrives to soak me and everything else within reach. I had just managed to get them both more or less rubbed down when the doorbell rang. The dogs, half dry, broke away and rushed out from the kitchen into the hall, barking excitedly and scattering water-drops as they went. I pushed them to one side and half-opened the door as best I could. Thelma was standing on the doorstep.
I seized the dogs by their scruffs and bundled them back into the kitchen and then came back to find Thelma standing in the hall. One glimpse of my reflection in the hall mirror made me wish I could shut myself in the kitchen with the dogs. I was wearing a dreadful old blouse and skirt that I keep for doing messy jobs. As well as being old and unappealing, they were now heavily splashed with water and dog shampoo. I had no make-up on and my hair was hanging damply (and lankly) round my red and shiny face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said rather breathlessly, ‘I was washing the dogs.’
‘Oh yes, you always did have animals.’
She made it sound like some awful disease.
I led her into the sitting room and mentally groaned. I had embarked on the dog-washing straight after breakfast, before I had done any tidying up and the room was just as I had left it the night before. Then I had had a sudden fit of rearranging some of my books and there were piles of them on the floor as well as a dirty coffee cup (me), a dog bowl (Tris), an empty saucer (Foss) and a half-chewed Bonio (Tessa).
‘Oh dear,’ I said helplessly, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got around to clearing up this morning. Do, please, sit down.’
She removed a pile of newspaper cuttings from one of the chairs and sat down cautiously.
‘Oh, I quite understand. You intellectuals have your minds on higher things.’
I ignored this remark and offered her coffee.
‘No, thank you. It’s very kind of you but I haven’t much time. Goodness...’ She broke off and brought out from the seat of the chair an old cabbage stalk.
‘Oh, how awful! It’s Tess – she keeps thinking she’s a retriever and bringing things in from the compost heap! I do hope it hasn’t marked your skirt.’ It was just my luck that she was wearing a pale coffee-coloured suit which probably showed every speck.
She cast the cabbage stalk to the ground with some distaste and said impatiently, ‘Never mind, I expect it will clean. I wanted to talk to you about Mummy.’
‘Oh dear, yes. It must be such a dreadfully worrying time for you. I was absolutely appalled when Mrs Wilmot told me.’
‘You really have no idea where she is? I know she used to confide in you and I did hope that you might have a clue as to where she might have gone.’
‘I’m sorry. She never gave me any sort of hint that she might be going anywhere. And anyway, it really does sound as if she meant to come back – I mean, she told Ivy that she’d be back for tea. I am most horribly afraid that there must have been some sort of accident. I suppose you haven’t heard anything else from the police?’
‘No, nothing. I don’t know what sort of enquiries they’ve been making but it does seem most peculiar that no one seems to have seen her. Can you think of anything at all that might have happened to her?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to tell Thelma about the sleeping tablets. She was Mrs Rossiter’s daughter and she did seem very anxious about her mother’s disappearance, but I had the feeling that the concern was somehow for herself and not for her mother. It was concern, but not distress.
‘It couldn’t have happened at a more difficult time,’ Thelma said.
‘Yes, of course, you’ve got all these new commitments you were telling me about, those splendid new clients.’
‘Yes, there is that – and it really hasn’t been easy finding time to come down here and try and sort things out. I blame Mrs Wilmot. What is the use of a matron who lets her old people go wandering about like that, without any sort of check on them?’
‘Oh, come now, they’re not in prison.’
‘Well, you know what I mean. It’s quite irresponsible. I shall be writing a very strong letter of complaint to the Managing Director. I suppose I could sue, if something has happened to Mummy.’
Her voice became more animated at the prospect and she continued, ‘No, all that is inconvenient enough, but what’s really awkward is that she should be missing now that Aunt Maud is dying.’
‘Oh dear, yes. I do see that it must be very upsetting for her. If they’ve told her, that is. I mean, they may just have kept it from her.’
‘What on earth do you mean? Oh, I see. No, it’s not that. No, the problem is that if Mummy’s still not been found when Aunt Maud dies, it’s going to be absolute hell trying to sort out the Trust.’
‘The Trust?’
‘Yes, my grandfather was a most peculiar old man and he left his money tied up in a really tiresome way.’
‘Oh dear. I know that Trusts can be rather odd. Peter used to tell me about some very eccentric ones he had to deal with.’
‘Gordon says that all Trusts are set up simply to make money for the lawyers,’ she said.
I laughed, though I don’t think she meant it as a joke.
‘Anyway.’ she continued, ‘the whole thing is thoroughly ill-conceived. I suppose I’d better tell you, then you’ll see how difficult all this is going to be for me. I expect you know that my grandfather made a great deal of money in South Africa. He owned three department stores – in Johannesburg and Durban and one in Pietermaritzburg. He sold the Jo’burg and Durban stores in the nineteen-thirties when he brought his daughters back to England – my grandmother had died by then. But he wouldn’t sell the Pietermaritzburg store. It was the first one he opened and somehow he felt sentimental about it, I suppose.’ Her tone nicely combined respect for her grandfather’s business acumen and contempt for his sentiment. ‘When Mummy and Aunt Maud married, he set up this Trust. They would each have a moiety – that’s a share.’ she explained condescendingly. (I didn’t remind her that I had been married for over twenty years to a solicitor.) ‘A share of the interest on the money he got from the sale of the two stores. It was over a million then, in the ‘thirties – and a million was a million in those days. And, of course, it was pretty shrewdly invested. He was a good businessman. I suppose.’ she said complacently, ‘that’s where I get it from. Anyway, under the Trust Mummy and Aunt Maud inherited the interest, not the capital, and could only bequeath it to their children – not to their husbands. For some reason Grandfather never had a very high opinion of Daddy’s business sense and he always said that Uncle James would never make old bones – and do you know, he was right, because Uncle James died only ten years after they were married.’
‘Goodness!’ I said, quite overwhelmed by all this financial detail. ‘The problems of wealth. But what happens to the capital?’
‘Oh, that remains intact in the Trust, rather like an entail, so that the interest continues through the generations. But’ – and here her lips set in a thin line of disapproval – ‘there’s the question of the third department store.’
‘The one in Pietermaritzburg?’
‘Yes. He had this thing about keeping it in the family. So he said in his will that it must always remain a private company and it must also be kept intact, under one owner. The company mustn’t ever be divided up but must go to the heir – the eldest child, whether male or female – of his surviving daughter.’
‘So that if your aunt Maud dies first, then your mother’s heir – and that would be you, because you’re older than Alan – will inherit it, but if your mother dies before your aunt Maud, then your cousin Marion will get it.’
‘Exactly. And the amount of money is quite staggering. You see, in addition to the day-to-day profits of the business, and it’s a really big concern now, there’s all the money from it (and the interest on that) that’s been mounting up since Grandfather
died. That’s in another Trust fund. You see what I mean about lawyers; they must have made a fortune out of it already!’
I decided to ignore this slight on the legal profession. ‘It does seem a very complicated situation. And, as you say, there is a great deal of money involved.’
‘Exactly.’ Her voice rose and she became more excited than I had ever seen her. ‘You see how monstrous it is – and you can see how unbelievably difficult it is that Mummy should have disappeared just now when Aunt Maud is on her last legs.’
‘Yes, I do see...’
‘I bet Marion can’t wait to get her hands on that money – and that playboy husband of hers, he’s never done a day’s work in his life; they’ve just sponged off Aunt Maud all these years. It’s so unfair when you think how hard Gordon and I have worked and how much difference it would make to the business to have that sort of extra capital just now. I’m sure that if Grandfather were alive he would see that we ought to have it.’
I refrained from pointing out that if her grandfather were alive the situation wouldn’t have arisen and chose another tack. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met Marion’s husband.’
‘Van, they call him. He’s Dutch. Such a peculiar thing to marry a Dutchman! He’s supposed to be a painter, but I’ve never heard that he’s sold any of his pictures. They’ve lived for ages with Aunt Maud in that dreary house just outside Inverness. They’ve got a pack of unruly children, I can’t remember how many. They used to come down and stay with us sometimes – I can’t think why. Daddy always made it perfectly clear that they weren’t welcome, but you know how thick-skinned some people are. And Mummy’s always been rather silly and sentimental about Family, as she calls it.’
A sudden tapping at the window made her turn sharply.
‘Oh, don’t be alarmed. It’s Foss, my cat, he wants to come in.’
I got up and unlatched the window and Foss leapt down with a loud cry. With that particular instinct cats have for annoying people who dislike them, he made straight for Thelma and jumped up on to her lap, where he kneaded her skirt with his claws, thereby finishing its destruction. Thelma, in her turn, uttered a cry that was almost Siamese in its intensity, and I rushed over to remove my errant animal. With some difficulty I managed to unhook his claws and, lifting him off in spite of his very vocal protests, pushed him outside the door, where he continued to make his feelings known.