Presumed Dead

by Shirley Wells

  She shook her head. “I remember at the time how everyone was convinced she’d gone off with some man. Even her friends believed that. It hurt.”

  It would. But it was probably true.

  Two hours later, a box full of paper in his arms, Dylan was walking to his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was Dylan who should have been thanking her. Not only was she the answer to his current financial problems, she had given him something to think about. He was curious about the beautiful young woman who had vanished on that November night thirteen years ago. He was even more curious about her relationship with Terry Armstrong.

  Perhaps, after all, this wouldn’t be as dull as he’d thought.

  “Dylan?”

  He already had his hand on the car’s door. Another car was slowing to a stop not far from his.

  “Yes?” He walked back to her.

  “If you’ve time for a quick character assassination of my mother, Aunt Joyce is just the woman to do it.” She nodded at the car, her expression surprisingly grim. “My aunt and uncle, Joyce and Len.”

  Joyce, when she got out of the car, wore an expression very similar to Holly’s. Len was the only one with a smile. He was late forties, Dylan supposed, with thinning dark hair.

  “Hello, love.” Len hugged Holly, then held her at arm’s length. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “You should have phoned,” Holly said.

  “She wanted to come and see what had happened with—” Len nodded toward Dylan. “Is this him?”

  “Yes. This is Dylan Scott. Dylan, my Uncle Len and my Aunt Joyce.”

  “Pleased to meet you both.”

  Dylan’s hand was shaken by a smiling Len. It was then, somewhat reluctantly he thought, shaken by Joyce.

  “You’re going ahead with it then?” Joyce asked.

  “Dylan has agreed to try and find out what happened to Mum, yes,” Holly said. “Shall we go inside? Dylan, can you spare a few more minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  He wouldn’t miss this for anything. Several things were puzzling him. For example, how, when presumably Joyce and Len had taken Holly in out of the kindness of their hearts, there was so much animosity between aunt and niece. And how this surly, dour-faced woman could be Anita Champion’s sister?

  With four of them inside Holly’s home, the health and safety experts should have been on full alert. Holly refused to sit down so Joyce and Dylan took the sofa, and Len perched on one of the stools he’d carried through from the excuse for a kitchen.

  Joyce’s face still hadn’t managed a smile. She had hair that, unlike her sister’s long blond locks, was a greying brown colour. It was lank and uncared for. Her face bore no traces of makeup. Her skirt was brown, and the jumper she wore beneath her brown jacket was also brown. Everything about her was dull and drab. And brown.

  “You must have been close to your sister,” Dylan said.

  “No.”

  If he’d told her she was the ugliest woman he’d ever clapped eyes on, and it was possibly true, he couldn’t have insulted her more. “Oh, I thought that, as you took Holly in—”

  “I’ve never shirked my responsibilities, Mr. Scott. We had no children, Len and me, and we’d never wanted any. But as I said, I’ve never shirked my responsibilities.”

  “I see.” He saw why there was little love lost between the two women. Holly had been a “responsibility” from the age of eleven, it seemed. “Did you see her often? Anita, I mean?”

  “Twice a year, maybe. We had nothing in common.”

  “We were glad to have Holly.” Len smiled at his niece. “She was as lovely then as she is now. We’re very proud of her.”

  “Holly doesn’t want to hear this,” Joyce said, “but Anita was only interested in two things. One was Anita, and the other was men. You’re probably thinking it was unusual for a woman to go off like that. Not in Anita’s case, it wasn’t. She thought nothing of leaving Holly alone for a weekend while she stayed with some man or other.”

  “A weekend is one thing,” Dylan said, “but to vanish completely—”

  “Before we moved down here,” Joyce said, “Anita asked if we’d mind Holly for the weekend. I can remember it as if it was yesterday. She was supposed to collect her on the Sunday night because it was Holly’s first full day at the primary school on the Monday. Of course, Anita being Anita, she didn’t turn up, did she? It was left to me to take the kid to school. Do you know how long Anita was gone?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Then I’ll tell you. Almost a fortnight!”

  “That’s—”

  “Typical of Anita. She was the most selfish person I ever knew. From the moment she was born, she thought the world owed her something.”

  “You were—how old when she was born?”

  “Five.”

  “She can’t have been all bad,” Dylan said. “After all, she gave Holly a very happy childhood until she disappeared.”

  “Children are easily fooled. A child doesn’t understand right from wrong. If a child is having fun, it’s happy. It doesn’t care about education, financial stability or anything like that. Do you think Anita would have put Holly through university? Never in a million years.”

  “Aunt Joyce,” Holly said, “it’s my decision to try and find out what happened to Mum. If you have anything useful to tell Dylan, then please do so. I’m very grateful for all you and Len have done for me over the years, but slagging off Mum isn’t going to help, is it?”

  “Of course it’s not,” Len said with a stern glance at his wife. “Mind, there’s not a lot we can tell you, Dylan, because we didn’t see much of Anita. I was offered a job down here and so we left Lancashire when Holly was six. It’s such a long journey that we didn’t go back very often. Then Joyce and Anita’s parents died, so we saw even less of her. On the rare occasions we went back to visit my sister or brothers, we’d call on Anita, maybe go out for a drink with her even, but no more than that.”

  “It was enough,” Joyce said. “More than enough.”

  “You knew Anita’s father then,” Dylan said. “What was he like?”

  “Ian was a smashing bloke,” Len said.

  “Too good for her.”

  Dylan was longing to slap Joyce. She was like a snake, spitting malicious venom with every breath. But not as good looking. In fact, given her looks, her sour grapes had probably been present since the lovely Anita had entered her world.

  “We were at their wedding, of course,” Len went on, ignoring his wife again. “It was only a small do, at the local registry office, but—”

  “She only married him because she was expecting,” Joyce said.

  “Even so, she was happy that day.” Len smiled at Holly as he spoke. “She looked an absolute picture and she didn’t stop smiling. She wanted everyone to be happy with her.”

  “When she disappeared,” Dylan said, “was there anyone special in her life? Apart from Holly, I mean. Anyone she’d met recently? A new man perhaps?”

  “There was never anyone special in her life.” Joyce’s tone was scathing. “She was too selfish. Even Holly, her own daughter, wasn’t special. If she had been, she’d never have gone off and left her, would she?”

  “We never heard of anyone,” Len said, “but we hadn’t seen her that year. We’d had a card from her the previous Christmas with her usual scribbled note, but that was all. We hadn’t been to Lancashire that year, you see.”

  “Can you tell me if she ever mentioned a man named Terry Armstrong to you?”

  “Not that I recall.” Len looked to Joyce for confirmation.

  “She wouldn’t have mentioned her men to me,” Joyce said. “She’d have got pretty short shrift if she had. She had a daughter. She shouldn’t have had time for men.”

  Dylan wondered if Joyce was religious. It often seemed to him that, the tighter a person clasped the Holy Word, the more un-Christian they became…

  “If she�
��d been in any sort of trouble, would she have come to you for help?” Dylan addressed his question to Len, who was more helpful, but Joyce answered anyway.

  “Money, you mean?”

  “Any sort of help.”

  “I doubt it,” Len said, and he seemed to regret that. “We just didn’t have the contact.”

  “I see. So how did you find out that she’d gone missing?”

  “The police came to see us,” Joyce said, “wanting to know if we’d heard from her. Well, of course we hadn’t. But as I say, I wasn’t going to shirk my responsibility. Family is family no matter what. We went straight to Dawson’s Clough and fetched Holly.”

  “It wasn’t quite as straightforward as that.” Len spoke with the patience of a man well used to clarifying his wife’s snappy remarks. “As Holly was only eleven, the police soon had social services involved. We thought Holly might go to her dad but Ian hadn’t seen her for 8 years—”

  “She couldn’t even remember him!” Joyce spoke as if Holly wasn’t there.

  “She couldn’t.” Len’s smile for Holly was warm. “Holly didn’t want to go to Ian, and social services thought it would be less traumatic for her to come to us.”

  “Because we could give her a decent home life.” Joyce threw back her shoulders. She would have made a good drill sergeant. “Ian didn’t even have a job at the time. Besides, he’d made it clear how much she meant to him, hadn’t he? For all he cared, she might not have existed.”

  “And, of course,” Len said, “we all assumed it would be short-term. We thought Anita would be back.”

  “You might have.” Joyce clearly hadn’t.

  Dylan wanted to get away from these depressing people. Or Joyce at any rate. There was nothing she could—or would—tell him about Anita’s disappearance.

  As soon as they’d run out of conversation, he got to his feet. “Time I was off. It’s been good to meet you both.”

  Holly walked with him to his car. He guessed that she, too, needed to step away from them for a few moments.

  “Your aunt bears no resemblance to your mother,” he said at last.

  “No.” She laughed at that, but it was a laugh heavy with despair. “None whatsoever. You’ll be in touch?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks.” She looked back at her mobile home and grimaced. “I’d better not shirk my responsibility any longer. Thanks again, Dylan. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

  Chapter Three

  At a little after two o’clock the following afternoon, Dylan sat in a small and shabby unisex hairdresser’s in Dawson’s Clough where the windows dripped condensation. Apart from a lady under a huge dome-shaped dryer, he was the only customer.

  The salon was in a street of old three-storey stone properties, some residential and some business premises. Nearby was a fish-and-chip shop, an Indian restaurant, an art shop and a baker’s.

  Thanks to a hassle-free run up the M1 and the opportunity to race up the M6 Toll road, the drive had taken him under five hours, and that had included a quick stop at Keele Services for petrol, coffee and a sandwich. He’d clocked the journey at two hundred thirty miles, so hadn’t done too badly.

  Lancashire brought with it an unexpected feeling of déjà vu. Until the age of four, he and his mother had lived on his grandparents’ farm in the county. That had been west Lancashire, though, and Dawson’s Clough was as far east as you could go. Besides, when he’d been dragged from the farm to Birmingham, kicking and yelling loud enough to wake the dead according to his mother, he had been far too young to register anything. Yet there was a familiarity about the buildings cast from local stone and the unmistakable accents.

  As a teenager, Dylan had been on a school trip to Blackpool. They’d messed around in the amusement arcades and dutifully seen the famous illuminations. He couldn’t remember Lancashire as being anything special, though. Today, with a watery sun doing its best, the scenery amazed him. The towns—rows of terraced houses scattered around the long-silent cotton mills—ended abruptly and the Pennines rolled on seemingly forever.

  He supposed this corner of east Lancashire could be bleak when mist or snow covered the hills, but now, it was stunning.

  “Would you like to sit here?” a woman called to him.

  “Thanks.” He took his seat in front of the mirror. “Just a trim, please. Not too short.”

  He assumed he was speaking to Sandra Butler. Her name was outside the shop and on several framed diplomas inside. Heading toward fifty, she was about the right age, too. She was reed-thin and shapeless, with a pinched face. Her hair, long, dark and streaked with red, didn’t look to be in good condition. Dylan expected hairdressers to have glossy, bouncy hair, but hers was dull and dry.

  “This takes me back.” He smiled as she picked up her scissors. “I was a salesman covering this area—oh, it would be fifteen years ago now—and I used to call at this very shop for a trim. Did you work here then?”

  “I did. I’ve owned it for twenty years this year.”

  “Really? I know I always got good service at a good price. You can’t ask for more than that, can you?”

  “I like to keep my customers satisfied.”

  “To tell the truth,” Dylan said, “I was hoping to—well, it’s a long story, but I remember another woman who worked here. Anita Champion, her name was. Daft really, but we went out together a couple of times and I was hoping she’d still be here.”

  The scissors stopped midair for a moment or two.

  “Anita? Blimey, you’re going back, love.” The scissors were idle but her hands weren’t. Lancastrians, it seemed, still needed their hands to talk, a legacy from life in the cotton mills when the noise made conversation impossible. “You’re out of luck anyway. She’s long gone.”

  “Oh? I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where she is now?”

  “Nope. She did a runner. Didn’t turn up for work one day and I didn’t get so much as a sorry on a postcard.”

  “Really?” Dylan feigned surprise. “That doesn’t sound like the woman I remember. I thought she enjoyed working here.”

  “So did I.” The scissors had to be still again. “We got on well at one time. She even had the flat above the shop.” She pointed toward the first floor. “A good wage, plus her tips.” Sandra Butler’s lips tightened. “It just goes to show. Took me for a right fool, she did.”

  “She had a young daughter, didn’t she?”

  “She did, but that wouldn’t stop her. She thought nothing of leaving that kid to fend for herself. An eleven-year-old in that flat alone—” She shook her head at the very idea. “A selfish bitch, that’s what Anita Champion were.”

  “What happened to her? The kid, I mean.”

  “Got taken in by Anita’s sister. She and Anita were chalk and cheese. Anita looked out for herself and didn’t care a jot for anyone else. As I found out to my cost.”

  “What exactly happened?” Dylan asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Anita didn’t turn up for work one day, you say?”

  “It were a Saturday night.” The scissors were idle. “Four of them went out on the town. I would have gone with them but my boyfriend of the time, Eddie, were home on leave from the army, and we wanted time on our own, if you know what I mean.”

  After a sharp nudge in the shoulder, Dylan assured her he did.

  “There were Brenda, Yvonne, Maggie and Anita. They all met up in the Commercial, that’s the pub round the corner from here. Then they went on to Oasis, a club. It’s closed down now, but we had some times there, I can tell you. Anyway, Yvonne could never hold her drink so she went home early, but that’s the last any of them saw of Anita.”

  “What did the police make of it? I assume the police got involved? After all, she could have had an accident or something.”

  “When she hadn’t turned up after a week or so, the police asked a few questions, but what were the point? If she’d had an accident, the hospitals would have known
about it.” Those scissors, held tight in hands that moved erratically as their owner spoke, came dangerously close to his eye. “Looks like you’ll have to forget that drink, love. She’s long gone.”

  “Hmm.” Dylan shifted in his seat. “It’s not quite that simple. The thing is—it’s embarrassing really, but I was only twenty-four and she’d have been almost thirty. We had a bit of a fling and, yes, I know I was a fool, but I gave her a ring that had belonged to my mother. Emerald. Antique. I was really hoping—needing—to get it back.”

  Sandra Butler shook her head at such stupidity.

  “You and dozens more, love. She were always after men—always getting what she could from them. Believe me, if it were valuable, she would have sold it years ago.”

  “Oh? Did she have money problems?”

  She laughed at that. “Course she did. It used to burn holes in her pockets.”

  Snip, snip, snip.

  She brushed loose hairs from his collar. “Right. Seven pounds fifty, please.”

  Dylan eyed himself in the mirror and was relieved to see she’d done a tidy job.

  “I’m in a bit of a predicament, aren’t I?” He stood and took his wallet from his pocket. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where her friends are—the three people she went out with that night? Or her daughter? I have to find Anita.”

  “You won’t do that.”

  “I can at least try.”

  “I don’t know where her daughter is. Like I said, she were taken in by Anita’s sister and they lived down south somewhere.”

  “What about the friends she went out with that night?”

  “They’ll only tell you what I have.”

  “They might remember something else. Be able to give me some clue perhaps.”

  She looked at him for long, long moments. It was an odd look, as if he were a horse she was thinking of buying at market.

  “Yvonne still lives in the Clough,” she said. “I can give you her phone number, if you like.”

  “Would you? I’d be extremely grateful.”

  “Not that she’ll tell you anything else.” She took one of her business cards from a pile and wrote down the number without having to look it up. “There you go.”