“They’ll understand it’s basically a formality. You’re not exactly calling them in to search for her. The important thing is that they are notified that none of her family knows where she is, and they have a description of her on their files.”
“In case a body is found,” said Ted unhappily.
“Well, yes, that, but only among other possibilities.”
“Oh, Lord.”
Adam came back sometime after four. Graham watched him walking from the direction of the school. He had a boy of his own age on either side of him, and they were talking and laughing. Graham realized at once that the day had been a great success, and that his first major decision on Adam, to get him a temporary placing in school, had been the right one.
When he came in, Adam was full of his day, the game of soccer he’d played that afternoon—in which he’d shone, in his own eyes at least—and the boys he’d palled up with.
“Oh, and I had school dinner, is that all right?”
“It’s fine. What about lessons?”
Adam went vague on those, but at least it was clear that he’d been to some.
“Oh, and I’m going to Jack’s place later on to download some tracks.”
“That’s okay. When would you like to eat?”
“I told you, I had school dinner.”
“Well, have a sandwich. I don’t want you begging Jack’s mother for food.”
Adam seemed to have undergone a metamorphosis. From the glowering figure with the outsize chip on his shoulder he had become a contented (and rather full-of-himself) fourteen-year-old. He wolfed down two ham sandwiches, had a shower (because the showers at school were “really primitive”), and breezed out of the house. Graham noted the shower: Adam was obviously a boy who had never had maternal scoldings about keeping clean. But being a sportsman, he had worked out a regime for himself.
The evening stretched out, but then it always had. He hadn’t noticed it when he was on his own. He didn’t fancy music, or the television rubbish he often indulged in (television was the right medium for rubbish, he contended, and it did it much better than it did the serious stuff). There remained the entertainment medium that he realized he had become rather addicted to in the past few weeks: the telephone. He rang Enquiries, with nothing beyond the surname Telford and the place Wimbledon. He got two names, with the initials D and S. He rang the second.
“Two seven eight nine six four one.”
“Is that Mrs. Telford?”
“No, it’s miss or Ms., whichever you prefer. I’m not bothered. I’m Sarah Telford.”
“Ah, I think I’ve got the wrong number. I was wanting to speak to the parents of Terry Telford.”
“Oh, that’s my mum and dad. The number’s in the directory, and it’s D for Derek.”
“I’ve got it then. I wonder if you could help me, though, and then I wouldn’t have to bother them. It’s a slightly delicate matter, potentially.”
“I’ll try, of course.”
Graham swung into fictional mode.
“I’m a journalist, and I’m doing an article—it may develop into a series—on people who have been adopted and have sought out their birth parents.”
“I feel I’ve seen articles on that subject before.”
Sharp, Graham thought. Be careful.
“There’s nothing new under the sun, especially in journalism,” he said, sounding confident. “Now Terry is adopted, isn’t he?”
“That’s right.”
“And he’s discovered both his birth father and mother?”
There was a definite silence.
“It’s news to me if he has,” she said at last.
“That was what I was told. Does this mean that his adoptive parents have been kept in the dark about this?”
“Well, if they knew, I’m quite sure I would have been told.”
“You’re in regular touch with them?”
“I was round there this morning, and Terry rang while I was there. We talked afterwards about him doing supply teaching, and hoping to get a permanent teaching position. Nothing at all was said about his birth parents. My mum and dad have never said anything about it. It hasn’t been discussed as far as I know.”
“Nothing? Ever?”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said never. They may have said—speculated, as it were—that one day he might want to find out who his mother was, maybe make contact with her. Nothing more than that.”
“Do you think your parents would be upset if he did that?”
There was another pause.
“I honestly don’t know. I should think they’d prefer it if they were told first. It’s possible that they might feel it as a kind of blow, a comment on them as parents. Though God knows Terry got more love than any child I know.”
“Were you adopted too?”
“No. But it was a difficult birth, and Mum was told not to have any more. I was ten when Terry arrived, so he got an awful lot of love from me as well. How did you know—if it’s true—that Terry had met up with his birth parents?”
Graham once again drew on his talents as a fiction writer.
“I was with a crowd at a club. He was one of them—I’ve seen him but not spoken to him. It was mentioned that he’d sought out his birth parents and was very happy with both of them. That’s why he seemed to be an ideal subject. But the adoptive parents are very much in the picture as far as my article is concerned, and of course I couldn’t approach them if Terry himself hasn’t.”
“I’m quite sure he hasn’t.”
“It seems an odd situation: his friends know he’s done this, but his parents don’t.”
The definite, decided voice at the other end came straight back.
“It doesn’t seem odd to me at all. When you were in your teens and twenties, I bet you had a lot of things in your life that your friends knew about, but which you made damned sure your parents didn’t.”
“Point taken. I don’t think your parents are going to be suitable for my piece, especially as I wouldn’t want to upset them. Would you keep quiet about this call?”
“Of course. They’re very gentle people. I’d hate to upset them.”
Putting the phone down, Graham had again a vision of his mother, hair covered by a knotted head scarf, her hands plunged into hot washing-up water in the sink. The image was succeeded by another: of his mother at school sports day, at which he never shone and only tried to mark time convincingly. But her face was bright with pride—perhaps at how convincingly he was faking, perhaps because she was taken in herself.
That image was in its turn succeeded by another: of his father in the garden, where he worked all the hours he could secure from his spare time. He could not understand why Graham would not join him, and why he sometimes made remarks like “There’s more to life than working in the garden.”
“There is,” he would say. “But nothing that gives half the satisfaction.”
Yes, there had been things in Graham’s young life that he had never shared with his parents. Then he remembered that he had never said anything about Peggy to any of his friends either.
Adam got back quite early from Jack’s. He said he’d had a good time, but it was obvious he could hardly keep his eyes open. The events of Monday night were taking their toll. He went off to bed, and Graham missed his company. But he missed that of Christa still more.
She returned the next evening. She had put in a few appearances at classes and lectures, but she had made her position clear to the principal. She had been home to Milton Terrace, accompanied by her friend Josie (she couldn’t explain why she was nervous, but she was, and got out of the house as quickly as possible). She had piled clothes and books into the largest suitcase she could find, then made sure Graham met her at Ipswich station. His heart leapt within him when he saw how long-term she apparently regarded her stay with him as being.
“Won’t Darren miss you?” he asked, gesturing at the case.
“Who?”
“Is
n’t that your boyfriend’s name?”
“Oh, Darren! I’d forgotten him. I haven’t seen him for ages.”
“Can’t be much more than ten days,” said Graham. “You mentioned him in Green Park.”
“It seems like ages, so much has been going on. I’m single and looking at the moment.”
Graham felt quietly pleased. He couldn’t think of any young man in Hepton Magna who would fit the bill for a sophisticated young Romfordian.
“How are things at home?” he asked.
“Same as when we were there. I left a note on the table so she knows where we are when she eventually comes home.”
“That was sensible. You didn’t go to the police?”
“Oh, no. Grandad says he’s told them she’s gone missing, and I don’t see they need to know any more than that. The less they start bothering themselves with Adam and me the better.”
That was a sentiment Graham could only agree with.
For the rest of the week Christa went about the business of settling in. She took over the cooking, which was mainly for her and Graham, since Adam preferred lunch at school, which left him free (if occasionally hungry) in the evenings. He opted to spend his evenings with his growing circle of friends, which Graham had to tell himself was absolutely normal. Christa began the same process of finding a circle of young people of her own age, and on Friday evening went into Bury St. Edmunds with them, describing it as dullsville, but quite pleasant. Unspoken between her and Graham was the fact that Peggy had not rung. One day when Christa was out, he rang Mrs. Poulson, the next-door neighbor he had spoken to on his first visit to the Webster house. She said there was no sign of life in the house, beyond the fact that Christa had come and gone. He phoned the Halliburtons as well, and they said there had been no sign of Peggy at the shop. They didn’t think there was any need to worry.
On Sunday he took Christa and Adam to visit their grandmother in Stanway, making sure they rang her first to assure her they weren’t being dumped on her and would just be with her for a couple of hours or so.
“That was sensible,” said Christa in the car. “I don’t know why she thinks she’s going to be landed with us for life, but she does.”
“Grandparents are the new exploited class,” said Graham. “Their children go out to work, both parents, and they dump their littlies on the oldies without even having the decency to pay them.”
“It’s not as though she would have to wheel me round all day in a pram,” said Adam.
“True. But she probably realizes that it’s when children become teenagers that the problems start,” said Graham.
“I don’t know why you should say that. I’ve been no trouble. You don’t know what problems are yet.”
They all laughed, but Graham was conscious that Adam’s remarks were both good-natured and true.
Mrs. Webster was the perfect stage granny from the neck up, but she was clad in tracksuit bottoms and trainers lower down, and as she said with a wry smile, “I’m damned if I was going to put on Sunday best for you lot.” She’d put together a table of cold meats and salads in the two hours since they had rung, and she had also had the foresight to forget about “afters” so that she could send the “children” on the ten-minute walk to the nearest supermarket. Graham knew she wanted to talk, and, watched by three censorious cats, he gave her a succinct account of the events of the past week.
“It’s all in character,” she said when he had finished. “Peggy always did exactly as she pleased, all the time she was married to my son Harry. No other consideration entered into it.”
“I gather she even swindled her father out of the house.”
“That’s right. She got it for a song simply by refusing to pay the rest she was owing. Though she paid in a way. It was the last straw for my Harry: he’d winked at all sorts of behavior—moral, legal, sexual behavior that was way over the limits. But he drew the line on her cheating her dad. There was no way he could pay off what was owing, so he just took off.”
“When was this?”
“About ten years ago, just after they moved to Milton Terrace. Christa was old enough to understand something of what happened.”
“And now Harry is married again, I believe?”
“Yes, he is. You’re thinking of Adam, I suppose—I know how upset he is about losing contact. I’m afraid Harry is the type who makes one bad choice after another. His wife seems to make him happy, but it’s by keeping him completely under her thumb. There’s no way she’s going to take responsibility for Adam—they have two of their own, so that’s understandable, especially when he’s been paying maintenance for Christa as well. But the wife puts everything she can think of in the way of Harry ever seeing the boy. I’ll try to talk to him at work tomorrow, tell him where Adam is, and maybe he can get down on the pretext of coming to see me.”
“Where does he live?”
“Stevenage. Not much of a place, to my way of thinking.”
“If you had a bet, what would you say is Peggy’s game?”
“Satisfaction of a whim…initially anyway. Very nice, very self-pleasing, perhaps just a bit of good fun. She was like that when I knew her—she and Harry came here often—and I’ve no doubt she’s like that now. Never could look ahead, not even by a couple of hours. She’s always enjoyed flirting with danger. That may be what she’s doing now.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” said Graham.
And his unease increased as, day by day, they heard nothing whatever of Peggy.
Chapter 10
Missing Persons
When Christa went back to Romford on the Monday, Graham decided to spend the next few days getting to know Adam. This proved to be more difficult than he had expected. He got to know him rather as a bus driver might say he had got to know a commuter. Adam was perpetually in and out, forever in transit, and since he fixed himself a sandwich whenever he needed food, they did little more than hail each other in passing. When Graham saw Adam in the outside world, he seemed to be surrounded by two or three of an army of friends, always talking and laughing.
Graham remembered Christa saying on the night of the dinner that Adam didn’t have friends as other people had them. If she was right then, there had been a miraculous transformation. Graham could not attribute it to himself, so he had to conclude that it was Adam’s being liberated from Peggy that had had such a promising effect. He tried to put himself in Adam’s mind to understand the change, but failed dismally. He wondered whether the change was only cosmetic—whether these boys he saw him with were not in fact “friends” even in the schoolboy sense, but only acquaintances, perhaps even fans. With the revival of sport as a national obsession, prowess at any game probably scored highly in secondary schools. On the other hand, appearances were against such a reading of the situation. There was mutual pleasure in each other’s company written over all their faces and bodies, and Adam was in or out of most of their houses every evening.
“You can bring your mates here whenever you want,” Graham said to the boy one evening.
“Oh, they’d like that, just to see what the writer’s house is like,” Adam said. “Just the once.”
“Why only once?”
“Well, they’ve all got mums when we get hungry. I wouldn’t want you to have to make food for that lot.”
Graham didn’t greatly fancy it either. And he was quite sure the food, by their lights, wouldn’t be much good.
“I’m beginning to get worried about your mother,” he said, the next evening, when Adam was just in and not quite off to bed.
“Are you? I never think about her.”
Graham didn’t think this was, or could be, true.
“It’s over a week now. There may come a point when the police will find it odd if we don’t make a bit of a fuss.”
Adam considered this.
“She might have met up with that stupid long-lost son. Probably she’s made it up with him, and they’re all lovey-dovey somewhere or other i
n London.”
“It’s one of the possibilities. But when he left Luigi’s, he was almost as angry with her as you were.”
After a few minutes Adam said:
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Terry is your son.”
“Apparently.”
“And it’s not surprising she’s so happy, when he was her first child, and she was forced to give him up.”
Graham remembered Ted Somers’s mutter that there was no pressure on her from her parents.
“If she was forced to give him up,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s the thing…. You have to look at everything she says, check it if you can, to see if it’s true,” said Adam at once. “I’m fed up with it.”
That was as near as Adam came to opening his heart.
It was a great joy and relief to Graham that he did not have to consider Adam in any way as a suspect. If Peggy’s body had been found in the streets of Romford, the son whom she had so publicly quarreled with would have to have been near the top of any policeman’s list. But the idea of him meeting up with her, murdering her, then spiriting her away (how?) or finding a hiding place for the body that had kept her hidden for over a week—all these were not possibilities: they were beyond belief. Anyway, Adam was probably with his friend Mickey Leatherby and his parents at the relevant time, and then with Graham and Christa for the rest of the night.
“Is it all right if I go to Romford tomorrow?” Graham asked Adam the next day.
“Course it is. I’ve got a key.”
“There’s one or two people I think I should talk to there. And then I’m wondering if I should go to the police.”
“The police? I’ve thought about them since you mentioned them.” Adam was all tensed up now. “Won’t they wonder about us?”
“Well, I thought I could tell them that I’m a sort of stepfather to you both. That should square things with them and reassure them that you’re safe and well. Like I said, I’m afraid of them getting suspicious if we report her disappearance, then don’t give any sign afterwards that we’re worried about her…. I think I could handle them better than your grandfather.”
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