The Missing Wife

by Sheila O'Flanagan

  ‘For crying out loud!’ Vince exploded. ‘All I want to know is if this damn B&B still exists, and if so, where it is. And if it’s still being run by someone in the Fournier family. That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

  ‘We will have to check the records,’ said the man smoothly. ‘That takes time.’

  ‘But not a bloody week!’

  ‘We have other things to do,’ the official said. ‘It is the tourist season and we are busy. Also, people from the office are on vacation.’

  ‘I’m trying to find my missing wife.’ Vince waved the photo of Imogen and Madame Fournier in front of him. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you people?’

  ‘If you are looking for a missing peson you should be talking to the police.’

  Vince stared at him. ‘Is it a case of money, is that how it works? Because I’ll pay—’

  ‘Are you trying to bribe me?’’ The official looked startled.

  ‘If that’s what it takes. I want the information. There’s no point in my going to the police. It’s not like that.’

  ‘You cannot bribe an official.’ The man looked at him grimly.

  ‘OK, maybe I was out of line there. But the thing is, my wife is missing and I need to find her.’

  The official regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then held out his hand for the photograph. He studied it intently then returned it to Vince.

  ‘I cannot say for certain where that was taken,’ he told him. ‘It could be anywhere along the coast. Although it looks to me more like Toulon than Marseille.’

  ‘How far away is Toulon?’

  ‘Less than an hour by car,’ replied the official.

  ‘If I check it out, can you find out for me about the Maison Lavande and the owner, Madame Fournier, by this afternoon?’

  The official looked at him in disbelief. ‘We will be closed before you get back,’ he said. ‘Return on Thursday and ask for me. Marcel Royale. I will try to have some information for you.’

  ‘Thursday!’ exclaimed Vince. ‘But that means hanging around here for a few days.’

  ‘Where better to stay than our beautiful city! Or you can take a trip along the Côte d’Azur.’

  ‘This is a bloody scam,’ said Vince.

  Marcel frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake! What time on Thursday?’

  ‘Eleven am,’ he replied. ‘Hopefully I will be able to help you then.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Vince.

  He turned on his heel and walked out into the brilliant sunshine. He was seething. It was beyond doubt, he thought, that all they had to do in the town hall was click on a few records to find out about the bloody Maison Lavande, but they couldn’t be arsed to do it. As for being busy – well, it hadn’t looked busy to him. Government offices, no matter what the country, never did.

  He went into a bar that offered free Wi-Fi and ordered a small beer while he took out his phone and searched for Toulon on Google Maps. According to the map, it was sixty-five kilometres from his current location, so he supposed it would be an easy enough job to check it out. He’d hire a car, he thought. He was fed up with trains, no matter how good they were. When he’d finished the beer, he turned back towards the town and went into a car hire agency that he’d noticed earlier near his hotel.

  The selection was limited but he managed to obtain a Renault Mégane with sat nav, which he drove carefully along the Quai du Port before turning on to the motorway. It was a pleasant enough drive, he conceded, the French roads being as good as the French railway system. Fifty minutes after setting out, the disembodied female voice of the sat nav told him he had reached his destination, and he pulled into the first available parking space he could find.

  He got out and made his way towards the seafront, holding the photograph in front of him and checking it against the houses he saw as he walked. But there was nothing even vaguely resembling the building in the photo, and Vince began to think that Marcel Royale had deliberately misled him. But he might as well be chasing shadows here as in Marseille, he thought. The damn house could be anywhere. And so could Imogen.

  He didn’t find any clues in Toulon, nor in the other small towns he visited along the coast over the next couple of days. His last stop was Cannes, where he remembered Imogen saying she’d stayed with a friend when she’d been a student in Paris. He had no idea where the friend had lived, but he held out a vague hope that he might simply bump into his errant wife walking along the Croisette.

  The colourful streets were busy, but there was no sign of her. It looked like he was going to have to depend on Marcel Royale in the town hall in Marseille to come up with something to point him in the right direction. He couldn’t believe Imogen was hiding herself so successfully. He refused to believe that she could evade him for ever.

  He sat at yet another quayside bar, ordered a coffee and rang Shona. He thought his wife’s friend sounded guarded.

  ‘She’s been in touch, hasn’t she?’ he said. ‘I thought as much before.’

  ‘Not at all.’ But there was no conviction in Shona’s voice.

  ‘Has she sent you a text? An email? You know, Shona, you’re not helping her by keeping stuff from me.’

  ‘OK. OK. She phoned me to say she was safe and well,’ admitted Shona.

  ‘When?’

  ‘A little while ago.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘She asked me not to.’

  Vince’s grip tightened around his phone.

  ‘Did she say where she was?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s her number, Shona?’

  ‘I don’t know. The caller ID was blocked.’

  ‘What about her email address?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘She’s changed it, hasn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t … Why would you think that?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘I’ve sent her emails. She hasn’t replied.’

  ‘It was the same with me until she phoned,’ said Shona.

  ‘Why did she phone?’

  ‘I told you. To say she was all right.’

  ‘How did she sound?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Shona. ‘A bit … a bit reticent, I suppose.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘What good would it have done?’ said Shona. ‘I don’t know where she is, Vince. Honestly.’

  ‘Did you tell her I was in France?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘You did, didn’t you?’

  ‘I had to,’ said Shona.

  ‘You realise you might have messed it all up for me?’

  ‘We weren’t talking for very long.’

  ‘She must have given you some clue about where she is,’ said Vince. ‘Listen to me, Shona. I understand that you’re on her side. Of course you are. You’re friends and you want to believe her. But you’re on my side too because you know that all I want is for Imogen to be OK. And when I find her, if she doesn’t want to come home, that’ll be fine. All I want is to be sure that nothing awful has happened to her.’

  ‘She seemed happy enough to me.’

  ‘She’s good at putting up a front,’ said Vince. ‘You don’t know her as well as I do, Shona. She has issues.’

  ‘I rather got the impression that you were the issue,’ Shona told him.

  ‘I’m not going to deny there have been some bumps in our relationship,’ Vince said. ‘But deep down she knows I love her. My main concern now is for her health and her happiness.’

  ‘She didn’t say a word about where she was. Honestly,’ said Shona. ‘But I promise faithfully I’ll let you know if she rings again. I want to do what’s best.’

  ‘What’s best for Imogen right now is to come home with me and get some help,’ Vince said. ‘I appreciate what you’ve said, Shona, and I promise you that I won’t do anything to upset her.’


  ‘OK,’ said Shona.

  ‘Keep in touch.’

  Vince ended the call and looked out over the water as he tried to bring his anger under control. Bloody women, he thought. He’d known that eventually Imogen would cave in and ring Shona. If he’d been with her when she’d got the call, he could have sorted it there and then. Imogen wouldn’t have been able to keep her location a secret from him. In fact, she would have been begging him to come and get her. As it was, he couldn’t be entirely sure he’d managed to get Shona on side again, but at least she’d promised to phone if Imogen got in touch with her. It was a pity, really, that he hadn’t brought Shona along with him. If she were sitting in front of him right now, he knew he’d be able to wheedle any information she had out of her, but it was considerably more difficult over the phone.

  He waved at the proprietor and asked for a menu. At least the hoteliers and bar owners in this part of the country were less snooty than their Parisian counterparts, he thought, as he ordered a steak and a half-bottle of red wine. Which was one small mercy.

  By the time he returned to Marseille and his appointment with the town hall official, he was fed up with France and everything French, even if he’d finally managed to persuade them that when he asked for well-done meat, that was exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t in the mood to take any crap from Marcel Royale, who’d be looking at a damn scene if he didn’t have any information for him.

  At least it was promising that he’d only been kept waiting for ten minutes, he thought, before he was brought into a small, impersonal office where the civil servant was waiting for him.

  ‘Mr Naughton,’ he said, making a reasonable attempt at the pronunciation of Vince’s name. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘It is?’ Vince’s tone was sceptical.

  ‘It’s always good to have visitors in our beautiful city,’ said Marcel. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed your stay and managed to see some of the other towns too.’

  Had the whole come-back-on-Thursday thing been a ploy to keep him spending money in the south of France? Vince wondered. It wouldn’t have surprised him.

  ‘I have some information for you,’ said Marcel. He picked up a sheet of paper and looked at it.

  ‘The Maison Lavande was a chambre d’hôte residence on the Rue Florette, about ten kilometres outside the town,’ he said. ‘It was in the Fournier family for nearly fifty years, and then was sold to the Benoits. It remained as the Maison Lavande until it was sold again three years ago, this time to an English couple named Johnson. It is still run as a chambre d’hôte but is now called La Vie en Rose.’ He smiled slightly. ‘The English have romantic ideas about running businesses in this country, but it seems that it is doing quite well.’ He pushed the paper towards Vince. ‘I hope this helps you.’

  Vince glanced at it, although as it was in French, all he understood were the names that Marcel had read out to him.

  ‘This is the address?’ He pointed to the words Rue Florette.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marcel. ‘It’s off the Avenue du Prado.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Vince stood up.

  ‘I hope you find your wife,’ said Marcel.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘But sometimes …’ He sighed. ‘Sometimes the bird flies away, no? And we have to accept it.’

  ‘My wife hasn’t flown away,’ said Vince. ‘She wants to come home. She just doesn’t know it.’

  Marcel Royale looked at him thoughtfully and extended his hand.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said

  ‘Thanks.’ Vince shook the man’s hand, then walked out of the office and the building.

  The sat nav guided him effortlessly to the Rue Florette, a narrow tree-lined street with an air of faded gentility and detached houses behind tile-capped walls. It wasn’t what he had been expecting. Whenever Imogen had spoken about the Maison Lavande, she’d talked about a big house with lots of open space. He’d visualised it as being out on its own, not in a residential area. But perhaps there was space behind the walls, Vince thought as he parked the car, although it was equally likely that his wife’s memory was faulty.

  He walked along the street, looking at the numbers of the houses and assuming there’d be something to identify the Maison Lavande, or La Vie en Rose as it now was. Bloody stupid name. Even the French official had thought so. He was halfway along when he saw it, a two-storey house with a terracotta tiled roof, set behind dark green double gates. A tiled plaque with the name painted on it in pink was attached to the pillar beside the gate, and a tumble of bougainvillea arched over the walls. A bronze bell hung from the pillar too, but there was also a modern intercom system and Vince pressed the button.

  Nobody answered, but the gates slid open and he stepped inside. The garden was beautifully tended and the house itself had clearly been recently renovated. The shutters were painted dark green to match both the gates and the Juliet balconies outside the upstairs windows, while potted plants and the bougainvillea were vivid splashes of colour against the green and the sand-coloured walls.

  The front door was made of glass and was propped open. Vince walked into the entrance hall, where a petite blonde woman stood behind a small desk.

  ‘Bonjour,’ she said, and immediately switched to English when he said hello in response. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Are you Mrs Belinda Johnson?’ asked Vince.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you can. I’m trying to find out about the previous owners of this house.’

  Belinda Johnson looked at him with a startled expression.

  ‘My wife lived here as a kid,’ said Vince. ‘I’m trying to help her rediscover her past.’

  ‘Oh.’ Belinda peered past him.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Vince said. ‘I’m doing this to surprise her.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Belinda again.

  ‘So what I want to know is what happened to Mrs Fournier who used to own the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Belinda. ‘You’ve caught me completely unawares. You are …?’

  ‘My name is Vince Naughton,’ said Vince. ‘My wife’s name is Imogen. Imogen Weir.’ He frowned as he said Imogen’s maiden name. ‘She lived here when she was younger.’

  Belinda, who’d been looking at him with a degree of suspicion, suddenly smiled. ‘Weir … Weir. I think I know the name,’ she said. ‘But can you give me a moment? I was dealing with a guest query when you rang the bell. Why don’t you sit on the patio and I’ll join you shortly.’ She waved in the direction of the back of the house, and Vince, after a moment’s hesitation, went outside.

  The garden was beautiful. Slender trees and box shrubs, as well as still more potted plants, were set around a fountain, which shot a spray of water high into the air, making a rainbow of light in the noonday sun. Chairs and loungers, some occupied by guests, were arranged beneath green parasols. Vince sat beneath one himself and waited until Belinda Johnson came out of the house carrying a large ledger and a small photo album.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Now, tell me what you want to know.’

  Vince repeated the story about wanting to find out about Imogen’s past, a story that he’d decided would be perfect for the English owners of the guest house. And he was right, because Belinda was only too keen to help him.

  ‘I did recognise the name but I don’t have very much information, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘We bought from a French couple a few years ago. The place needed a lot of upgrading, so we practically gutted it, although we tried to retain its original charm.’ She paused, and it was only when she started speaking again that Vince realised he was supposed to have congratulated her on doing just that. ‘Our guests are very happy,’ she continued. ‘We have a lot of repeat business.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Better late than never to stroke her ego, he thought. ‘You’ve done a great job. The house is lovely, and so are the gardens.’

  She beamed at him. ‘Thank you. The old garden was full of mismatched styles and overrun by lavend
er. We ripped out most of it and decided a change of name was in order.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Vince.

  ‘But in all the renovations, we did find this.’ She handed him the ledger. ‘It’s a guest book from nearly thirty years ago. And here are some photos we found too.’

  Vince opened the ledger. Some photographs had been pasted on the inside cover, with inscriptions underneath. The first was of an elderly woman with grey hair coiled in a plaited bun on her head. It was captioned Jeanne Fournier, propriétaire, Maison Lavande. Beneath were photos of Agnes and Berthe; although they were much younger, Vince recognised them from the day of his wedding to Imogen. Below their photos were two more. One of Carol Weir, smiling at the camera as she leaned on a broom handle, and another of Imogen as a baby, sitting on a rug in the garden clapping her hands.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ Belinda beamed. ‘We keep it here for guests to look at because we have some people who come back year after year and their parents or grandparents visited the Maison Lavande in the past. Of course we don’t have a guest book now – it’s all website comments and TripAdvisor. But this is a lovely keepsake. Maybe the photo album will help you a little more.’

  Vince turned the first page. Most of the photographs were of people he didn’t know, but there were a few more of Agnes, Berthe and Carol, and half a dozen of Imogen as a toddler and a young child. It was a weird sensation looking at her doing handstands in the garden, unaware of her future.

  ‘My wife would love these,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you going to bring her here?’ asked Belinda. ‘We’d be delighted to have you both as our guests. Where is she now?’