But she could see that her musings were only serving to make Norman more irritable than ever at what he apparently saw as just time-wasting, so she let it go.
***
There was just enough food to keep them going for one more day. For Alex, the time passed extremely tediously. Price was a tetchy patient, and that was putting it mildly. Mealtimes, when she could escape to the kitchen and get domestic, were the pathetic highlights of the day.
And just to keep out of his way for a while she pulled up a few weeds in the garden and dead-headed the roses, letting herself wallow in their heady sweetness.
While she was indoors she kept the television turned on, no matter what the programmes were, and ignored Price’s scathing remarks about the inane game shows and American imports. However mind-clogging Alex found some of them, she wouldn’t turn them off, since it effectively stopped her having to make conversation with this boor of a man.
On the second morning, she thankfully packed up the remaining food to take back to her flat. She’d paid for it anyway. Price left before her, still nagging her to get results and earn her money. She breathed a huge sigh of relief when she saw his car drive smoothly away — not that she had any intention of lingering.
But she couldn’t leave without changing the bedsheets and cleaning the bathroom and kitchen. She couldn’t let Caroline return and find that the place had been used so obviously. Being with Price for two days had depressed Alex, but this new thought was marginally uplifting.
By implication, restoring the cottage to tidiness for Caroline’s return meant that she was definitely coming back. Alex bundled the used linen into her car to send to the laundry and made a mental reminder to put the charge on Price’s bill.
The cottage was quaint and charming, and the type of place that many city-dwellers dreamed of retiring to. She presumed Caroline felt perfectly safe here. Alex didn’t, not any more. It was strangely oppressive to her now, and had taken on an altogether sinister feel. She was thankful to get in her car and head back to London and the land of the living.
She had only been away from home for two nights — three, counting the night in Bournemouth, she reminded herself — but in some ways it seemed like a lifetime. She went straight to the flat for a shower and a welcome change of clothes. There were no calls on her answering machine, and she felt a surge of dis-appointment.
It would have been fantastic if Mrs Selby-Jones had been able to let her know that Caroline’s next batch of work had been sent in. It would mean Caroline was still alive. still working, still capable of putting her skills into practice.
Alex swallowed, feeling the thickness in her throat, and knowing how much she longed for it to be true. She knew she had become too personally involved with this case, but it was difficult not to feel that way.
It had taken a long while before she recognized the similarity between herself and Caroline. On the surface they were poles apart, both physically and in personality, she guessed, but deep down, there was a fundamental similarity: they had both been deprived of a father’s love.
And who was getting awash with sentiment now? Alex asked herself, blinking her blurry eyes. She hadn’t been bothered by the fact for years, and it had taken this case, and in particular, her association with Father Price, to bring it all into the open again. There were times when she longed to put things right between them, and the chance would never come.
She wasn’t some Sam Beckett in a Quantum Leap situation... able to put right what once went wrong... she was doing it again, damn it... absorbing too much television.
But even the most amateur psychologist would tell you that the past affected the present. You couldn’t get away from it, because your own past made you what you were today. And she was letting herself get into a right old state of useless introspection, she thought savagely.
The phone rang, and she grabbed it quickly. Anything to get her mind off impossible scenarios, even if it turned out to be Gary being his normal brash self, asking her out, making her laugh, wanting her body...
She mumbled her name into the receiver.
‘Who is that, please?’ a woman’s voice said uncertainly.
For a moment she didn’t recognize it, and the caller obviously hadn’t recognized her muffled one either.
Then her heart leapt. ‘Mrs Selby-Jones? I’m sorry, you caught me at a bad moment. This is Alexandra Best. Do you have any news for me?’
‘I’m not sure if it’s of any significance,’ came the reply. ‘The next batch of crosswords has arrived, but there’s something a little different about them.’
‘Yes?’ Alex said, her breath catching in her throat.
‘Well, as I told you, our compiler is normally very efficient, and we always receive two identical sets of grids for each crossword. One grid is blank with the clues alongside, and the second grid has the answers filled in. We always proof-check them, of course, and in one of the sets we’ve received this time, there’s a lot of what I believe is called gobbledegook in the clues, and the completed grid is missing. Are you following me?’
‘Of course. Please go on,’ Alex said quickly.
‘That’s about it, really. It may have just been an oversight in leaving out the completed grid, and it was certainly an aberration regarding the strange clues, since many of them don’t make sense. We wouldn’t be able to use this particular crossword at all. I’m not sure if all this is of any use to you, Miss Best,’ she added apologetically, ‘but you did want to know when we heard anything.’
‘I did indeed. I think this may be very important, and I need to see the grid as soon as possible. Could you fax it through to my office, Mrs Selby-Jones?’
‘Oh dear. I’m afraid we don’t have a fax machine. There’s no need, you see?’ she said, without explanation. ‘I could arrange for someone to take it into the town to fax it if you wish, but we’re very busy with our current issue at the moment, so it wouldn’t be until later this afternoon.’
Alex made up her mind. ‘Then it would be just as quick if I come down myself. I can be there soon after lunch. You do have a photocopier, I believe? If you could copy the two parts of this doubtful crossword for me to take away, Mrs Selby-Jones, I would appreciate it.’
She knew it would be just as quick to wait for the fax, but she simply couldn’t sit about twiddling her thumbs for the rest of the day, knowing that there might be an answer in the badly prepared crossword grid.
‘We could do that, but you may as well have the originals since they’re of no use to us,’ she was told. ‘We’ll be expecting you later in the day then.’
Alex put down the phone, aware that her heart was pounding. At last she was onto something, and she prayed that these missing answers weren’t simply an oversight on Caroline’s part. But she was sure they wouldn’t be. By Mrs Selby-Jones’s own account, and by her own observations at the cottage, Caroline was meticulous in her work.
She would never have sent out an unfinished set of grids without a good reason. Either she was being unavoidably prevented from doing a good job on the work, which Alex didn’t want to consider — or this had been done deliberately, in the hope that someone who studied the crossword would find some significance in the answers that did make sense.
Looking at it from Caroline’s viewpoint, it must be a very slim chance, thought Alex, with a huge rush of sympathy. Mrs Selby-Jones and the girls working for her would be the first people to see the crossword and try to work out what had gone wrong, but in any case there was no reason why they would be suspicious about any of the answers unless they were looking for anything specific.
Alex could imagine Caroline’s desperation in doing this at all, but if these thoughts were correct, then it might have been her one chance of informing anyone of her whereabouts.
She found herself wondering what Nick Frobisher would make of all this, especially of the way Alex’s imagination was soaring in leaps and bounds now. He’d say she was living in fantasy land, but she knew there was ju
st as much logic in her feminine intuition as in his solidly analytical methods.
But he knew nothing about Caroline, nor her penchant for cryptic crossword-compiling. And when Alex was triumphant in producing the missing woman in time for her to claim her inheritance, she’d be able to tell Detective whizz-kid Inspector Frobisher a thing or two about detecting.
She switched on her answering machine again and left the flat. She didn’t care to think that any psychic influences were at work here, and preferred to keep well away from any of that caper. But she had an uncanny feeling now, almost as if the missing woman was reaching out directly to her, and she felt more buoyant than she had in days, with a certainty that once she had cracked Caroline’s clues, she’d be on the brink of finding her.
‘Winter cruise here I come,’ she thought. Though, with a little start of surprise she realized it had been the last thing on her mind lately. Caroline’s safety was paramount.
***
Gary Hollis had some information he was sure Alex would be interested to know. He hadn’t seen her for days. But even though he sensed she was going off him a bit he was still interested enough not to let her go.
With his usual brand of arrogance, he was sure that being apart for a while would just have made her all the keener. She wasn’t the only woman in his life, but it wasn’t every day you got to sleep with a luscious goddess — not that sleeping was ever on his mind at such times.
He wasn’t a forever kind of guy, but Alex was still the best thing on his horizon at present. And since she’d got so involved with this missing woman case of hers, he’d be able to tease her with a bit of useful knowledge and keep her sweet.
He called her flat that evening and scowled as he got her answering machine message.
‘If you’re there, doll, talk to me—’
She rushed across the room to grab the phone and switch off the machine.
‘Is that you, Gary?’ he heard her voice interrupt the message. Her bubbling, excited voice produced an immediate reaction in his jeans, but he soon realized that her excitement wasn’t for the thought of his body.
‘I’ve just got indoors this moment, and I was going to call you,’ she went on in a rush. ‘Can you come to the flat? I’ve come up with something very interesting and I could do with your help.’
‘I’ve come up with something interesting too,’ he said with a leer in his voice.
‘We’ll discuss that later,’ Alex said, too wound up to dis-courage him. ‘Get round here as soon as you can, OK?’
‘I’ll be there in about half an hour.’
She put down the phone. She had literally just arrived back from Bournemouth, and after all the dashing about of the past few days she would normally have felt drained. But not now. Not tonight, when she was sure she had a real lead at last. And knowing that she needed to share her exhilaration with some-body, Gary was just the one. There were times when being solitary didn’t fit the mood.
She hadn’t taken the time to study the crosswords properly when she picked them up from Mrs Selby-Jones, but she hadn’t been able to resist a peek when she stopped in a lay-by on the way back to London. She didn’t want to delay her journey home and she realized at once that if there were any hidden messages in the clues, they could be anywhere.
As Mrs Selby-Jones had said, so much of it was just gobbledy-gook, and the numbers given before and after the clues didn’t always match the spaces in the empty grid. It definitely needed studying, because it seemed that Caroline had either been ultra-careless — or ultra-clever.
Alex had tried to get inside Caroline’s mind, and guessed that any hidden message-clues would probably be dotted about.
Even so, one of them had leapt out at her after just a few moments. It wouldn’t make sense to any ordinary readers; it only made sense if you were looking for something special, but it told her she was on the right track.
The clue was Oral Cine — the start of the talkies, and the number of spaces the answer took up was correctly given as eight. In one nail-biting instant, Alex knew that Oral Cine was an anagram, and that the word it spelled out was Caroline.
The adrenalin had surged around her veins at that point, and she had driven back to London with a reckless speed, almost as if Caroline was drawing her back.
***
‘It’s good to see you, babe. I’ve missed you.’
Gary swept her into his arms the minute he entered the flat. The essence of the night-time outdoors combined with the sensuous smell of his leathers enveloped Alex for a moment. His cheeks were cool and fresh, his stubble just tingly enough to be tantalizing, and she remembered why she had fallen for him in the first place. But that could wait.
When she could catch her breath, she opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say a word, he forestalled her.
‘You’ll never guess what I discovered today. Your bolshy bloke at Price Chemicals has been beaten up,’ he announced. ‘The factory was my last call this afternoon, and boy, was he in a state, ranting and raving all over the place, and giving everybody a piece of his mind. Even the warehouseman had plenty to say about him for once.’
‘Like what?’ Alex said, momentarily diverted.
‘Oh, just that he always knew he had it coming to him, and it would never surprise him if old Pricey didn’t end up in a ditch one of these dark nights with his throat cut.’ He spoke with relish. ‘Surprised you, have I?’
‘Actually, you haven’t,’ Alex said, almost sorry she had to admit it from the disappointed look on his face.
‘You mean you already knew? Bloody hell, Alex, you’re cuter than I thought.’
‘Never mind all that. I’ve got something far more interesting to tell you about than Father Price’s mugging. I’ve tracked down the place where Caroline sends her crosswords, and we’ve got some solving to do. She’s the cute one, and if my theory is correct I’m sure she’s trying to tell somebody where she is.’
‘You mean there’s something more behind that plain Jane than meets the eye?’ Gary said with a grin, and then pretended to back off as she glared at him. ‘OK, she’s not that bad, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call her cute.’
‘Shut up for a minute, and take a look at this.’
Not wanting the cosiness of the sofa to interfere with work, Alex took the crossword grid out of her bag and put it on the table so that they both had to sit on dining-chairs to study it.
‘I was never much good at crosswords,’ Gary said. ‘Give me a code to crack and I’ll do it. But crosswords, no.’
‘You’ll help me solve this one, or you’ll be getting a crack on the head from me,’ Alex told him. ‘Now concentrate, and let me show you what I’ve found already.’
She marked the relevant clue and its answer with a yellow highlighter pen. Gary looked at it for a moment and said nothing. Then he began his tuneless whistle, while Alex told herself that however annoying it was, it was best not to interrupt whatever thinking processes went on in his mind at such times.
‘Most of it doesn’t make sense,’ he said at last.
‘I know. But assuming that some of it does, that’s what we have to sort out.’
‘Well, why don’t you get a different colour highlighter and cross out the rubbishy bits?’ Gary said, clearly caught up in the chase now.
‘Brilliant,’ Alex said.
She didn’t want to admit that two brains were better than one, because they frequently weren’t. They could often send people off in different directions with too many options. But this time, Gary had scored.
It took a fair time to eliminate everything that didn’t make sense, because some of it was so nearly logical. Caroline obviously found it difficult and offensive to appear completely stupid, and she had been almost too devious in parts. But at last there were half-a-dozen clues that looked like possibles.
‘This could be something,’ Gary said, pointing. ‘The number of blanks fit, anyway. Five and eight letters. There’s nothing to help us from the firs
t clue, though. She might have thought about that,’ he grumbled.
‘And she might have been too uptight to worry too much about connecting the clues,’ Alex retorted. ‘I don’t know what it means though. Do you?’
She read it aloud. ‘Not exactly onshore even offshore could be cat’s whiskers. Why cat’s whiskers? Why not exactly onshore? I don’t get it.’
‘Read it slowly. Separate the words as if they’re not connected. It’s not a proper sentence, anyway.’
Alex did as she was told. Obviously her thought processes weren’t working along the same lines that his were — if they were working at all.
‘Not. Exactly. Onshore. Even. Offshore. Could. Be. Cat’s. Whiskers.’ It meant even less to Alex than before, and Gary began whistling, infuriating her all over again.
‘This is no good—’ she began in frustration, and then she jumped as he slapped his thigh hard.
‘Cat’s whiskers — do you know what that was?’
‘Uh — something to do with early wireless, wasn’t it?’ she said, dredging it up in her mind.
‘Yes, but think radio, instead of wireless. And radio not exactly onshore means that it may be offshore. The rest of it’s probably a blind. What does that tell you?’
It was all a blind to her, but his brain cells were clearly galloping away faster than hers were now, Alex thought. She should be able to see what he was seeing, and she damn well couldn’t.
‘It’s not telling me anything,’ she said in annoyance.
‘Radio, babe. Offshore radio. And the clue is five and eight letters. Radio Caroline!’
‘Good God!’ Alex said. ‘So what does this tell us about where she is?’
After a minute he said, ‘Precisely nothing, I’d say.’
‘No? You don’t think we’re looking for her in some exotic place, like on a cruise-liner then? How about if her M had simply whisked her away for a romantic trip around the world and that I could follow her and claim it on expenses?’
Alex kept on talking, the rush of excitement fading fast as they stared at the mutilated crossword grid. There were only a few bits left that weren’t highlighted now. And then she felt her heart began to beat faster again.
Thicker Than Water (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 1) Page 19