by Sarah Rayne
The phone call was brief but productive. ‘Your friend did talk to Edmund Fane,’ said Michael, putting the phone down. ‘And he somehow managed to arrange for her to get into Ashwood Studios.’ He saw Fran’s reaction, and said, ‘Didn’t you think of checking Ashwood? It’d be the first place most people would think of in connection with Lucretia. And if you live in North London it isn’t very far, is it?’
Francesca thought it was not very far at all. She thought Trixie could have got there and back in an afternoon. ‘But she didn’t believe she could get access, so I haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Edmund Fane got access for her. He tracked down a solicitor who holds the keys. And,’ said Michael, looking at her very intently, ‘he met your friend there on Monday afternoon.’
‘Monday afternoon would fit,’ said Francesca, thinking back. ‘I didn’t actually miss Trixie until Tuesday night. I had a parents’ evening on Monday, and some of us went out for supper afterwards. I got back quite late and went straight to bed. Mornings can be a bit of a scramble, so it was Tuesday evening before I realized properly that she wasn’t around.’
‘Would she have gone out to Ashwood without telling you?’
‘There was no particular reason for her to tell me. I’m only a sort of lodger. She’d probably have talked about it afterwards though, because she liked talking about her thesis, and she’d have been pleased with herself for getting into the studios.’ This sounded rather nastily critical of Trixie, so Fran said, ‘But we’re midway between East Barnet and Enfield, so it’s not far.’
‘Edmund Fane said he left her at the studios at about five,’ said Michael. ‘She wanted to prowl around a bit and draw some plans of the layout, so he left her to it. Fane says he drove home and as far as he recalls, got back about half past seven.’
For some reason – perhaps something in Michael’s voice – Francesca did not much like the sound of Edmund Fane. She said, ‘Why did he have to go all the way there? Couldn’t Trixie go on her own?’
Michael considered and then said, ‘Yes, I think she could have done, but Fane is very meticulous and a bit fussy. He probably thought it was the correct thing to do. Or maybe he was asked to go along to verify your friend’s genuineness. Solicitor to solicitor, or something.’
‘Oh, I see. That doesn’t give us any leads though, does it?’ said Francesca. ‘Unless Trixie crashed her car driving back.’
‘A crashed car would have been found and reported by now, I should think.’
‘But if it happened on a lonely stretch of road—’
‘Nowhere’s that lonely these days.’
But Francesca had a sudden vivid image of Trixie lying dead in a ditch somewhere, being rained on and investigated by weasels, and because this was not an image she wanted to get stuck with, she said firmly, ‘What I think I’d better do is get in touch with this Ashwood solicitor.’
‘All right. Fane gave me his number. His name’s Liam Devlin. D’you want to borrow my phone?’
Liam Devlin, reached by Michael’s phone, said he would be perfectly happy to meet Miss – Mrs? – Holland at Ashwood. Yes, he would bring the keys out later today if she wanted, although she had better come clad as if for tempest, fire and flood, on account of the entire Ashwood site sinking into a mire after days of rain.
Francesca promised to arrive suitably garbed, hung up, and accepted Michael’s offer of a quick wash-and-brush-up in the rather antiquated cloakroom off the hall. She was a bit tousled and pale from the long journey, and her mouth looked too wide for her face in the way it always did when she was tired or anxious. She brushed her hair, which she had had cut very short after leaving Marcus – it made her look like Joan of Arc after a night on the tiles, but it had represented a very satisfactory two-finger gesture to his simpering blonde and her gleaming shoulder-length hair – and went back to the kitchen to thank Michael for his help.
It was infuriating, having got all the polite thank-yous and interesting-to-have-met-yous, and all the conventional safe-journey farewells out of the way, to encounter a completely unresponsive engine when she turned on the ignition. Absolutely dead. Not a spark.
Fran swore and tried it again, and this time a faint, slightly sinister, smell of petrol came into the car’s interior. Petrol-flooded or waterlogged or something. Third time lucky? She turned the key again, and this time, in addition to the ominous silence, the warning light for over-heating the engine glowed balefully at her from the dashboard. Hell’s teeth. Now there was nothing for it but to go back into the house and find the number of a local garage. The trouble was that it was Friday afternoon and the odds were that no one would be able to come out until tomorrow at the earliest. Which meant she would have to phone Liam Devlin and put off their meeting at Ashwood, and that, in turn, would most likely mean Monday morning before she could get into the place. Bloody, bloody internal combustion engine!
A shaft of light showed from the open door of the house, and Michael’s voice said, ‘It looks as if you’d better come back inside, doesn’t it?’
‘Wretched thing,’ said Fran crossly. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know how to fix it?’
‘You suppose right. What time were you meeting Liam Devlin?’
‘Six o’clock.’
He looked at the car, and Francesca had the sudden impression that he was holding a brief, silent argument with himself. But he only said, ‘You do the damsel in distress role very thoroughly, don’t you?’
‘I didn’t mean to get stranded,’ said Francesca, and heard with annoyance the note of apology in her voice that had always infuriated Marcus.
‘I’m going back to London this afternoon,’ said Michael. ‘So I could drive you to Ashwood – at least, I could if you know the way. And I could wait for you while you take a look round, and then drop you at your house afterwards.’
So this was what the inner argument had been about. His sense of chivalry had been nudging him to make the offer but he had not really wanted to do it, so he had been trying to think of a polite way out. Perfectly understandable. Francesca said, very firmly, ‘Certainly not. I couldn’t possibly put you to so much trouble. I can easily phone Liam Devlin and arrange another meeting.’
‘But if your friend’s been missing since Monday, perhaps you shouldn’t delay matters. Give me ten minutes to lock everything up, and I’ll be with you.’ The smile that made him look unexpectedly mischievous showed again. ‘Chalk it up half to chivalry and half to curiosity. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have some company on the journey.’
The second thing you absolutely never did in life was to get into an unknown man’s car and embark on an unfamiliar journey with him.
But for the moment Francesca was more concerned with wondering how to tactfully reimburse Michael Sallis for the extra miles he would have to cover, than with speculating whether he was planning to carry her off to a serial-killer’s lair or a bordello in some steamy Eastern port. She supposed if she offered to pay for petrol he would refuse. Perhaps she could suggest a meal or a snack on the road somewhere, and pay for that. Or would it look like a come-on? When you had been married for five years you got out of training for this kind of thing. Would it be better to send a note of thanks to him c/o CHARTH’s offices, enclosing a book token or a Thresher’s voucher, or something of that kind? Oh, for goodness’ sake! said her mind crossly. Surely he’s not going to interpret a cup of coffee and a sandwich at a Little Chef as an invitation to unbridled passion!
These doubts having been put firmly in their place, she opened a road map to find Ashwood, and scribbled down directions on the back of her cheque-book. It would not hurt to appear efficient and organized, even if you were neither of these things. Fran made careful notes, and then, hoping she had got all the roads and traffic islands properly identified, said, ‘Tell me a bit about CHARTH. It sounds quite an unusual charity. Shall you actually use that house for your homeless teenagers?’
He took his eyes off the road for just long enou
gh to look at her, as if he might be trying to decide if this was a genuine request, or if she was just being polite. Francesca had the feeling that he probably found small-talk boring. He had nice eyes, though: very clear grey and fringed with black lashes.
‘A lot depends on the surveyor’s report and builders’ estimates,’ he said. ‘We’d need to add extra bathrooms and probably a second kitchen. The attics are quite large, though, so we might make use of them. I’d like to think we could actually use the house rather than sell it and invest the money – I think that’s what Mrs Fane really wanted us to do.’
He paused, as if weighing up whether to say any more, but Francesca, who was interested, said, ‘Go on. How would you use the house?’
‘Most of the teenagers we deal with come from the real bottom of the heap – they’re often homeless through no fault of their own. Some of them were born into squats and doss-houses, or abandoned by a mother who went off with the newest man and left them to fend for themselves. Some ran away from abusive parents at incredibly young ages – seven, eight years old – and lived rough.’
‘How about reading and writing?’
‘Trust a teacher to go for the literacy side,’ said Michael. ‘But you’re quite right: a good many of them can’t read, or even count to ten, or tell the time. We try to get them on training programmes or into adult literacy classes so that they’re at least semi-equipped for life. We aren’t a particularly aggressive set-up – we don’t force anything on anyone, but a surprising number of youngsters do get referred to us by probation officers and child-care specialists and organizations like Centrepoint or the Samaritans.’
‘Do you actually deal with the training?’ He looked as if he would be more at home in an Oxford common-room than trying to teach under-privileged teenagers how to cope with today’s world.
‘My side of it’s a bit more basic. I arrange for them to learn the real nuts and bolts of life: the things that you and I don’t think about twice, but that they don’t understand because they’ve never had them.’
‘What kinds of things? I’m not just being polite – I’m liking hearing about this.’
‘Well, for instance, if you’ve always lived in a derelict house with no gas or electricity or running water you won’t know much about cooking a meal and eating it at a table with knives and forks. You’ve probably had take-away food all the time, or eaten straight out of tins of baked beans and soup. So you don’t know how to use a cooker or how to shop for food.’ When he talked about his work the reserve melted a bit, and his whole face looked different. ‘Or even simpler things than that,’ he said. ‘Like how to switch on an immersion heater to heat water for a bath, or change a light bulb. So we have halfway houses where we put a group of them for two or three months, and try to teach them. It’s better to use fairly remote places for that – some of them can be a bit undisciplined. But if that goes all right, we promote them to a bedsit if we can find one, and from there to acquiring employment skills. I do think Deborah Fane’s house would make a good halfway house.’
‘It’s an unusual line of work,’ said Fran thoughtfully. ‘Do you deal with any of the asylum seekers? Some of them are quite young, aren’t they?’
‘We’ll probably have to in time. At the moment we’re leaving them to the government organizations, though.’ He gave her another of the sideways glances. ‘When it’s successful, it’s rewarding work,’ he said, and Francesca had the feeling that he had considered first whether or not to say this, in case it gave away too much of his inner self.
‘It must be very rewarding indeed.’
‘There’s a high percentage of failures. Some of them inevitably revert to type. Sleeping rough, dealing in drugs.’
‘We get the drug problem at my school sometimes – I don’t suppose there are many schools that escape that, though. And we get the usual quota of difficult teenagers, of course. It’s not always easy to know how best to cope with them. They’re so defensive.’
‘Everybody’s defensive sometimes,’ said Michael, and Francesca felt, as if it was a tangible presence, the barrier of reserve click back into place.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Liam Devlin’s office in Ashwood was on the first floor of a beautiful old building that might once have been the town house of an Elizabethan merchant. His room was disgracefully untidy, but Francesca thought it was the kind of untidiness you would rather enjoy working amidst. She glanced at Michael and had the impression that he thought so, as well. There were masses of books and documents, and ancient Ordnance Survey maps, and several nice old prints on the walls. The jutting bow window apparently overlooked the main street, but it was difficult to see out of it because a large black cat composedly occupied most of it.
‘You do realize,’ said Liam, having let them in and introduced himself, ‘that this appointment is wholly out of character for a man of the legal profession. It’s six o’clock on a Friday evening, and everyone else has gone home. In fact the conventions require me to have left the place about three and headed for a golf course, or the local Conservative Club, or a mistress’s bed.’
He did not look as if he ever did anything as conventional as play golf, and the only political organizations he might be likely to support would be ones with romantic or rebellious aims, on the lines of restoring an exiled monarch or fighting for downtrodden serfs. On the other hand, Francesca could easily believe in the mistress’s bed. She said, ‘It’s very good of you to meet us so late.’
‘It is, isn’t it? Sit down while I get the keys – the chairs are cleaner than they look.’
The chairs were perfectly clean, although it was necessary to remove various files from two of them before they could be sat on. The desk was just as littered, but it was still possible to see that it was at least a hundred years old and that it had a master craftsman’s graceful lines. Fran glanced at Michael, who was inspecting two framed caricatures of legal scenes which hung near the door.
‘Hogarth originals?’ he said when Liam returned with the keys.
‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘Something in the quality.’
‘I like having the real thing,’ said Liam carelessly. ‘You never know when you might need to sell something to stave off the creditors. Shall we go? We’ll take my car, if you like. It’s not very far, but since I know the way—’
‘All right.’
‘So now,’ said Liam, as they set off, ‘we’re looking for the elusive Ms Smith, is that right?’
‘Well, we’re trying to find clues as to her whereabouts,’ said Francesca from the back seat, which was strewn with cassettes and files and two or three battered paperbacks. The cassettes were a mixture of Gregorian plainchant, Bach cantata, and what Fran, from daily exposure to classrooms of teenagers, recognized as very goth, very aggressive, hard rock. The paperbacks were Mansfield Park, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and the latest Harry Potter.
‘She was certainly a memorable lady,’ said Liam, driving too fast along Ashwood’s main street, and turning on to an open stretch of road. ‘So I shouldn’t think you’d have much trouble in picking up her trail. Is she given to disappearing for several days, do you know?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Ah well, life’s full of these surprises that jump out at you, flexing claws and teeth, and people are full of surprises as well.’ He swung the car into a narrow rutted lane with overgrown hedges on each side. ‘This is the lane leading to Ashwood’s site. Shockingly overgrown, isn’t it? But one day it’ll be bought by a rich consortium, I expect, and they’ll bulldoze it to the ground and build neat little boxes for people to live in, and there’ll be a proper road here instead of a tanglewood lane that might lead to a sleeping-beauty castle, complete with moss and bats. And once that’s happened,’ said Mr Devlin, who appeared to possess his fair share of Irish eloquence, ‘the von Wolff legend will dissolve like a cobweb over a candle-flame and be lost for ever. And that’d be a pity, wouldn’t you agree,
Mrs Holland?’
‘I would. Uh – it’s Francesca, by the way. Or Fran, for speed.’
‘Well then, Francesca, I hope you’ve got weatherproof shoes on, because once we get to the gates and I’ve found a bit of terra firma to park on, we have to get out and walk.’
‘Will we be able to see anything?’ asked Michael.
‘Not very much, for it’s as dark as a—’ The car’s headlights cut through the darkness as Liam swung round to park, and the analogy, whatever it might have been, was never uttered. Fran said, sharply, ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
‘Over there,’ said Liam, and his voice was so different to his previous offhand tones that Fran felt a stab of fear. Something’s wrong. And then she saw where Liam was indicating, and the fear came surging up more strongly.
Parked a few yards away, just inside the car’s headlights, was a rain-splattered estate car, and it did not need a second look to know it must have been parked in that same spot for a long time, because the wheels were half-sunk in the wet mud.
Trixie’s car. The weatherbeaten, seldom-cleaned vehicle she had driven ever since Fran had known her, because it was reliable and there was room for the dogs in the back. Absolutely unmistakable.
After what felt like a very long time, Michael said, ‘I suppose I’m reading this situation right, am I? That’s her car, is it?’
‘Yes,’ said Francesca. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘In that case, Devlin, it’s as well you brought the keys, because I think we’ll have to take a look inside this studio. Francesca, will you stay in the car?’
But Fran was not going to stay out here alone in the unfriendly evening which already seemed to be filling up with shadows and whisperings. ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said firmly, and got out of the car before either of them could argue the point.
But neither of them did. Michael passed her her scarf, which had fallen on to the floor of the car, and Liam switched off the car’s engine and said, ‘I think there’s a torch somewhere on the back seat.’