by Hazel Holt
We put up the rest of the tables and Rosemary said conspiratorially, ‘Come on, while she’s not looking, let’s escape and go to the George for a pub lunch’
We washed the dust off our hands in the cloak-room, and as we slipped out we could hear Marjorie Fraser’s voice relentlessly going on, ‘It would be most unsuitable to have instant coffee. And anyway, if we have really good coffee we will be able to charge twice as much...’
We made our escape.
The George used to be a very splendid Edwardian hotel set in pleasant grounds near the sea. Nowadays, in the summer, it is fairly intolerable, with wooden picnic benches outside which attract a lot of young people with motor-bikes and old cars, but in the winter it can be quite pleasant, if one goes into the Lounge bar.
We hurried past the Saloon bar, raucous with juke-box and fruit-machines, full of young people, mostly those who stay behind after the end of the season, living on social security in winter-let bed-sitters, waiting for summer jobs again. There seemed to be more of them than ever this year, and as we settled ourselves in a peaceful window-seat in the Lounge bar, Rosemary commented on how unpleasant it had become in the town, to see them hanging about in noisy groups, even jostling the frail and elderly off the pavements.
‘What are you going to have?’ she asked.
‘Just a toasted sandwich for me and a glass of white wine.’
Rosemary ordered our food at the bar and returned with two glasses.
‘They’re bringing the toasted sandwiches when they’re done.’ she said. ‘I got you ham and cheese.’
We made those little fluttering noises and protests that all women seem to make when they are settling up any small sum of money, and then Rosemary said, ‘Did you have a good Christmas? I haven’t really had a chance to ask you, what with Marjorie Fraser banging on all morning. Did you hear from Charles? We had a Christmas card but it didn’t say anything much, only love. Did that Lee woman go over there?’
I wasn’t sure if Charles wanted me to tell any-one else about Lee’s disappearance, and, honestly, devoted as I am to Rosemary, she is the last person I would ever trust with a secret, so I simply said, ‘Yes, she did, and it all seemed to go marvellously well.’
Rosemary snorted. ‘Well, if Charles can’t see that she’s only after his money ... Men!’
I laughed, and Rosemary plunged on into other subjects.
‘Can you come and have drinks on Sunday? Jilly’s coming for the day with her bloke.’
‘Jilly’s bloke’ was Rosemary’s attempt at being modern and nonchalant about her daughter Jilly and the boy-friend she was living with in Taunton. He was a nice young man, from what Rosemary had told me, a police inspector, and there seemed to be no reason why they shouldn’t have got married in what to me was still the normal way. But, as Rosemary explained carefully, as one repeating a lesson, they felt they wanted a more open relationship.
‘Actually.’ Rosemary said, sounding slightly guilty, ‘Mother’s coming too. Of course, she wants to see Jilly, but you know how she feels about her and Roger – not that she’s met him yet. It’s that generation, I suppose. Anyway, she’s so fond of you, so if you could bring yourself to come and take her mind off things, as it were…’
1 said that I would be delighted.
‘Oh, bless you! See you on Sunday then, about twelve.’
I went back home and got out the ironing board. A lot of people hate ironing, but I find it very soothing and conducive to thought. I like the feel of the iron sliding over the material, and the way the creases are magically smoothed away. My thoughts ranged over what Carol had told me. Where was Lee? Presumably she had gone to meet Jay, whoever he (she, even, people had unisex names nowadays) was. Had she returned from that meeting or had she gone off somewhere with him? And – my thoughts became circular – where was she now?
Foss suddenly materialised, as he always did when I was ironing, and jumped on to the ironing board, seeking the warm spot where the iron had been. I addressed him as if he could solve my problem.
‘What on earth should I do, Foss? There’s nothing much I can tell Charles. I suppose he will have to be the one to go to the police if she doesn’t turn up, after all he’s her fiancé
– more or less. But then, if there’s some perfectly simple explanation, she would be absolutely furious.’ Foss gave a loud wail and lashed his tail across the board in front of the iron. ‘I know.’ I said, ‘I can go round to her flat. There might be some sort of clue there.’
There was another loud wail, possibly of affirmation. I opened a tin of cat food and put some down for him so that I could have my ironing board to myself again and finish my task. Then I made myself a cup of tea, and as I drank it I looked at the telephone directory and found that Lee lived in a block of flats by the sea-front. Definitely desirable and expensive, which meant that they would be guarded by an entry-phone. Fortunately, though, an old friend of my mother’s also lived there, so if I went to see her I could at least get inside the building.
‘No time like the present,’ I told Foss, and picked up the telephone.
‘Mrs Fordyce? Hello, it’s Sheila. Yes, very well, thank you. And you? Oh, splendid. I wonder – you know you said I could have that recipe for orange curd? Yes, that’s right. Well, I thought I might make some for the coffee morning next month. Would it be an awful nuisance if I popped in for it tomorrow afternoon? After you’ve had your rest? That’s so kind. I’ll see you about half past three then. No, I’m afraid I can’t stay to tea. Some other time, yes, of course. Goodbye.’
I put down the phone feeling a bit mean. She was a sociable soul and loved visitors. Since my mother’s death two years ago (Mother and Peter had died within months of each other – it was a truly dreadful time) she had been rather lonely. There were not very many of her generation left now. But I felt that it would have been very frustrating to have had to sit there imbibing tea and gossip when I wanted to be doing something
– though I was not sure what exactly I could do, even when I got inside the building. The following afternoon, with the recipe for orange curd safely in my shopping bag, I got to my feet.
‘So sorry I have to dash. And I’d love to come to tea next week. Wednesday would be lovely. No, don’t get up. I know my way out by now.’
Still chatting, I went to the door and pulled it behind me. Mrs Fordyce’s flat was on the ground floor and I didn’t want her to see me getting into the lift to go up to the top floor where Lee’s flat was.
The lift jerked to a stop and I pulled back the first of the lift gates. Through the bars of the second gate I could see a man standing, waiting to go down. He was short and burly, with a red face and a thick grey moustache. He was dressed in country clothes but somehow he didn’t look like a countryman. The olive-green waxed jacket was too clean, the tweed cap too new and the shoes not sturdy enough. He stared at me intently for a moment, and I instinctively clutched my shopping bag to me in a convulsive gesture. The sight of this mundane object seemed to reassure him, and he smiled politely as he drew back the other gate of the lift so that I could get out. I gave a little incoherent murmur as I stepped past him and he closed the lift doors and descended.
This encounter, for some reason, unnerved me slightly, so that I stood for a moment not knowing what to do. Then I moved towards Lee’s flat. There was, of course, nothing to be seen, just a closed front door. I had a vague memory of people in films and television plays opening locked doors with plastic credit cards, but, apart from my disinclination to do anything overtly illegal (what would Peter have said?), I wasn’t at all sure that I possessed the technical skill. On a sudden impulse I rang the doorbell. There was no reply, and I suppose I would have been surprised and disconcerted if there had been. I was still standing there in something of a daze when the door opposite was opened and an irate voice called out, ‘Now what do you want?’
I turned quickly and saw an elderly lady peering round her door suspiciously. She seemed equally surprised to s
ee me.
‘Oh, I thought it was him again.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That man, who was here just now.’
‘Was he looking for Mrs Montgomery too?’
‘Yes, he’s been several times. Seems very put out to find she’s not here.’
‘I rather wanted to see Mrs Montgomery myself,’ I said, giving her my best WVS smile. ‘Is she away?’
The atmosphere lightened a little, and the elderly lady came out on to the landing to converse more easily.
‘Yes, I think she must be. I haven’t heard her about for quite a while.’
‘Oh.’ I said brightly, ‘what a pity, a wasted journey. I wonder how long she’ll be away? Did she cancel her milk?’
She sniffed slightly. ‘Oh, she doesn’t have any-thing delivered – no milk, no papers, nothing.’ I could tell that she found such behaviour somehow peculiar. ‘She keeps herself very much to herself.’ I could imagine that Lee would not have bothered to take any trouble with her elderly, unimportant neighbour and would have been totally unconcerned about the impression she made. Unlike me, who always fretted if I wasn’t on friendly terms with everyone, however peripheral to my life. I suppose it’s a form of cowardice, really.
The elderly woman added, with the air of one who knows her civic duty, ‘I did push some letters and circulars through her letter-box a couple of days ago – well, they were sticking out and you never know about burglars and so forth.’
‘Oh well.’ I smiled again. ‘Thank you so much...’ I turned and went towards the lift.
When I got to the ground floor I suddenly thought about Lee’s garage. They were round at the back of the flats, each one numbered. The door of Lee’s was shut, but I put my shopping bag on the ground and crouched down as if to tie up my shoe-lace. There seemed to be no one about, so I peered in through a crack in the pull-down door. It was difficult to see in the dark interior, but eventually I decided that the garage was empty. Wherever lee was she must, at least to begin with, have been in the green Jaguar.
It was getting dark now, and I moved away before the outside lights of the flats came on. It began to rain, a cold, bitter rain that penetrated my thin headscarf and sent me shivering for the shelter of my car, which I had parked by the harbour wall. I sat there for a while, watching the steel-grey waves hurling themselves monotonously on the shingle, still shivering, as much from a strange kind of numb apprehension as from the cold. Then I switched on the car lights and drove back to my warm, safe house and the comfort of my animals.
Chapter Three
Rosemary’s drinks party was well under way when I arrived and she looked a little harassed as she greeted me.
‘Oh, Sheila – so glad you’ve come. Mother’s been looking forward to a chat so much.’
She led me over to where her mother was sitting on a sofa by the window. Mrs Dudley was the sort of elderly woman I absolutely loathe. She had been extremely good-looking in her youth, and in old age still seemed to care only for her appearance. She was self-centred, snobbish and difficult and made poor Rosemary’s life pretty hellish at times. Today she was wearing an obviously expensive beige and cream knitted suit
– cashmere, at a guess. Her make-up was considerably more skilful than mine and her hair was elaborately arranged. She indicated regally that I should join her on the sofa.
‘Dear Sheila, so nice to see you.’ Her voice was breathy and gushing, too young for her age. She often said effusively how much she admired me for devoting myself to an invalid husband (as if I had ever thought of Peter like that!) and – with a side-ways glance at Rosemary – for being such a support to my mother, who had been widowed at an even earlier age than I had been. This always reduced me to a state of incoherent fury, and I longed to say, ‘If they had been anything like you, you horrible old bat, I’d have been off like a shot!’
We chatted for some time – or, rather, Mrs Dudley held forth and I murmured sympathetically. She was complaining about These Young People and how casual and slovenly they were in their ways, how unlike her day when people cared about how they looked and how they behaved. She gesticulated with her hands, and the light caught the diamonds on her plump fingers, the nails painted bright coral pink, but with the tips and half-moons left white in the fashion of the 1930s.
‘All this nonsense about Jilly and this young man-a policeman!’ She spoke with distaste, and I remembered how Rosemary had never been allowed to make friends with anyone her mother had thought ‘unsuitable’. There had been no one more suitable than I – the daughter of a clergyman, whose mother had ‘private means’ – so that for many years I was Rosemary’s only friend.
‘And why’ – her voice became rather shrill – ‘they cannot get married decently like anyone else I cannot imagine. They seem to have no sense of shame...’ The old-fashioned phrase rattled round my mind and irritated me, so that, although I agreed with her in some ways, I found myself making excuses for them – these uncertain times, economic problems, income tax, even…
‘That’s nonsense and you know it,’ she declared roundly. ‘Right is right and wrong is wrong. You would never have done such a thing.’
‘I don’t know.’ I found myself saying, ‘nobody ever asked me to.’
She gazed at me in alarm, as if I had suddenly turned into a stranger, and, indeed, the remark was out of character – or, at least, the character I had always presented to her.
‘Sheila!’ Jilly was standing behind me and had obviously heard my last remark. She gave me a grateful smile and said, ‘Do come and say hello to Roger. I’m longing for you to meet him!’
I slipped back into my role of deferential younger person, telling Mrs Dudley how nice it had been to see her and that I’d have another word before I left, and rapidly followed Jilly across the room.
I could see immediately what had attracted Jilly to Roger in the first place. He was splendidly tall. Jilly, poor girl, was at least five foot ten and had often complained to me that all the really nice men were half her size! Roger was well over six foot and decidedly good-looking in a fair, open-air sort of way, which was definitely a bonus. I smiled at him approvingly, for I liked Jilly. She was a cheerful, easy-going girl, who treated me as a contemporary and not a sort of spinster aunt. It is always flattering, as we get older, to find the children of our friends apparently liking us for ourselves and not just as appendages of their parents.
‘Roger, this is Sheila. I know you’ll both get on. Roger likes books too.’
With this daunting remark she darted away with a plate of canapés.
Roger laughed. ‘After that, what can I say?’
‘What sort of books?’ I asked curiously. ‘Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Maigret? What do policemen read?’
‘Well, this policeman reads Trollope and George Eliot,’ he said. ‘And Charlotte M. Yonge. I was very interested in your article on the medical background in The Daisy Chain, in the Review of Literature: He smiled at my evident surprise. ‘If you think about it, the Victorian novel is the perfect antidote to twentieth-century violence.’
We embarked upon one of those eager conversations that enthusiasts for a comparatively unknown author find so absorbing, interrupting each other to praise our own favourite characters and incidents. We were chatting so easily and so comfortably that I found myself saying, ‘Roger, how do the police trace missing people?’
He looked at me sharply and was suddenly a policeman again.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Have you lost someone.’
I gave a little laugh. ‘Goodness, no,’ I said. ‘It’s just that in plays and novels – I often wonder, when it happens there, why the heroine – it usually is the heroine – never goes to the police, when presumably they could clear the whole thing up, just like that, and do her out of all her adventures!’
He smiled, but his grey eyes were serious. No fool, Jilly’s young man.
‘Well, actually, apart from the obvious things, like checking hospitals and circula
ting descriptions, there’s not much we can do. Computers make it easier to cover a wide area, of course. But I think you’ll find that a very large proportion of people who disappear do so because they want to. They don’t want to be found.’
‘I suppose so – poor henpecked husbands going off for a bit of peace, bullied wives. Yes, I can see that.’
‘There are kidnappings, of course, but, honestly, we don’t get many of those. And a few people disappear in connection with certain crimes – fraud and so forth. In certain financial situations a strategic withdrawal for a time is sometimes necessary.’
He spoke in a dry, almost academic tone, as though about to embark on a lecture, when we were interrupted again. Mrs Dudley had come up behind us and was about to impose her personality upon this unsuitable young man.
‘Now, Roger, I want to hear all about being a policeman.’ She made it sound as if he wore size twelve boots and a helmet. ‘What made you become one? Was your father in the police force?’
She led him away and Jilly giggled beside me. ‘If she thinks she’s going to patronise Roger she’s got another think coming! He’ll give her a very brisk lecture about CID work and then casually let her know that his father was a bishop – I must go and listen!’
On that agreeable note I left the party and drove home in a thoughtful mood. What Roger had said was obviously true. In the light of what Carol had told me, as well as Lee’s own remarks about the ‘sticky situation’ that she needed Charles’s help with, it might well have been necessary for her to go away somewhere. But where? And why for so long? And if she needed Charles’s help, why hadn’t she told him all about it, or at least made some sort of excuse for her absence? She must have known that he would worry if she simply disappeared.