by Isla Dewar
He interrupted his story by making regular trips bearing plates of goodies from his armchair to the sofa where Martha and Charlie sat, urging them to help themselves. ‘Eat up. Too much for me to finish after you’ve gone.’ His voice, large, rounded vowels, belied his age. Martha put him somewhere in his seventies.
‘Chrissie dropped out of my life years ago. I came home from work and she was gone.’ He addressed Charlie. A man would understand this. ‘I confess I didn’t notice at first. I thought she’d popped out to visit a friend to go to one of her committee meetings. I was just annoyed she hadn’t left me any supper. Had to make it myself. Scrambled eggs.’ He paused, drifted off a moment, gazing towards the window. Remembering. ‘Yes, definitely, scrambled eggs.’
Martha said, ‘Scrambled eggs.’
‘Yes. Haven’t eaten them since.’
Martha felt the same about lamb chops, the meal she’d cooked on the night Jamie didn’t come home. The very smell of them brought rushing back the gnawing anxiety she’d felt. ‘So,’ she said, ‘how long were you married?’
‘Twenty-five years when she went away. Birthdays, anniversaries missed.’ He leaned forward. ‘It worries me. I might not recognise her now. She could have dyed her hair. She’d be wearing clothes I haven’t seen before. I might walk past her in the street and never know. She’ll be sixty-five. Twelve years younger than me. It seemed a lot at the time. But we were happy.’ He scratched his chin. ‘I thought we were happy.’
‘Police?’ said Martha. ‘Have you been to them?’
‘Yes. They have a record of my wife going missing. They checked. Looked for unidentified bodies most likely. I used to go to the station once a week. Then once a month. Now I go on her birthday, once a year. They found nothing.’
‘Do you have children?’ Charlie asked.
‘No. We never got round to it.’ He poured everyone a second cup of tea and handed round the macaroons. ‘I’ve made a list of all her friends. All that I know of. And of the committees she sat on.’
‘Do you think she was having an affair?’ Charlie raised his eyebrows. ‘Sorry, I have to ask.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Had you argued?’
‘Yes. She’d run up a bit of debt. Very angry about that. But she never could resist pretty things. New dresses. Cushions. Perfume.’ He looked at Martha. ‘You women, you’re too easily tempted.’
Martha opened her mouth to object. Charlie silenced her with a nudge.
‘Well,’ Mr Lewis slapped his knees. ‘Time for my nap. I think you’ve got all the information you need. Go out and do some sleuthing. Find my wife and bring her back to me. I’ve got a few things I’d like to say to her before I depart this planet and, to tell the truth, I miss her.’
‘There are a few more things I’d like to ask,’ said Charlie. ‘Had your wife any dreams or aspirations? Did she have a driving licence and a passport?’
‘No dreams that I knew of. No driving licence. I don’t approve of women driving cars. It’s beyond them. They are not safe on the road. Can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. And she didn’t have her own passport; she was on mine as my wife. Anyway, she hated travelling. She hated abroad. We used to go to the south of France every year and she complained the whole time about the heat. Said the place was not suited to her pale Scottish blood.’ He started to usher them out of the room, thanking them for coming. Halfway along the hall, he stopped. ‘She used to sit in the shade drinking Pernod. I hated that. Hate Pernod. Hate scrambled eggs.’ He resumed hustling Charlie and Martha towards the front door.
Charlie protested, ‘I have more questions. What was your wife’s maiden name?’
Mr Lewis picked up a folder from a small table by the front door. ‘Everything I know about Chrissie is here. I’ve written it all down. An honest account, no detail left out, no lies.’
‘We’ll keep in touch,’ Charlie said.
Mr Lewis raised his hand, a slight protest. ‘Don’t bother. Just let me know when you’ve found her.’ He shut the door.
Out in the street, wind whipping round them, Martha said, ‘He’s brokenhearted.’
‘He’s furious,’ said Charlie. ‘He doesn’t like to be made a fool of. Not sure about this.’
21
It Takes One to Know One
The letter said Stop it. That was all. No signature. But Sophie was well acquainted with Jamie’s hand. She knew it was from him. And she knew what he wanted her to stop.
‘Won’t,’ she said, stuffing the letter into her apron pocket. She was on to something. ‘I’m hot on the trail.’
She’d been back to the record shop several times since her first visit. She didn’t go in but observed from a distance, sitting in her car, often using binoculars. They didn’t make a lot of difference. All she saw was people looking through racks of LPs and people buying LPs. No sign of suspicious goings-on and no sign of Jamie. This was probably because her stake-out time was restricted to the hours Evie was at school. She was sure Jamie was more likely to appear later in the day when the pubs were open.
She wasn’t sure what she’d do if she spotted him. She imagined herself confronting him, slapping his face perhaps. ‘That’s for seriously upsetting my daughter,’ she might say. That seemed feeble in the light of the hurt he’d caused. But she couldn’t call the police; he hadn’t really done anything that was against the law. Still, one good hard smack across his face at least would let him know he hadn’t got away with leaving his wife and child. He’d know there was someone in the world that loathed him and his cheek might smart for an hour or two. Jamie would also know you do not fool with Sophie and get away with it.
Meantime, when she wasn’t spying on the record shop, she was making a Mona Lisa cake. Taking this on had been a mistake. She now knew it was impossible to copy a masterpiece painting in seven days using icing. An approximation would be the best she could do, she’d finally told the man who’d made the order. ‘I’m no da Vinci. And I believe he took years. You’ve given me a week.’
‘An approximation is fine,’ the man agreed. ‘After all, we’re not putting it on the wall. We’re eating it.’
She was working on the background, leaning close to the cake shaping fuzzy trees in blues and greens with a palate knife, when the idea struck her. She could flush Jamie out. It was the sort of thing New York cops did in the movies. They frightened suspects into making a dangerous move that would be their undoing.
She went to the phone.
A young female voice answered.
‘Is Jamie there?’ asked Sophie.
‘Jamie?’
‘Jamie Walters.’ Sophie could hear music in the background. The Rolling Stones, she thought.
‘He doesn’t work here. He just comes in sometimes.’
‘Oh.’ Sophie heard someone in the background asking the girl who she was speaking to.
A man’s voice. ‘Who’s this?’
‘A friend,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to Jamie.’
‘There’s no Jamie here.’ The line went dead.
Sophie replaced the receiver. ‘He’s definitely there, then. Or they know where he is.’ She spoke to the cake. She’d fallen in love with it. The classiest thing she’d ever done. ‘He’ll be up to no good. Dealing drugs. That’s the sort of thing hippies do, along with calling the police the fuzz and protesting about wars. And him so quiet, too. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.’
Just before one o’clock Duncan turned up. This happened often these days. Sophie suspected the man only wanted to be fed. She was happy to oblige with a plate of homemade soup, a hunk of bread and some cheese. He repaid her with his company on a walk. She enjoyed the chat. It helped her to avoid thinking, a habit she deplored in herself.
At first she had been sceptical about Duncan’s tales. His past life seemed like something out of a novel. But then as he elaborated about lonely nights in foreign bars and lost loves, women who’d abandoned him and jobs that had turned out to be de
ad ends, she decided that if Duncan’s life had been gleaned from a novel, it hadn’t been a very good one. In fact, it would be meaningless and not exactly a page-turner.
It wasn’t hard to unravel the truth of Duncan’s past. He’d married the wrong woman, taken to drink and lost his job. After that, down on his luck, he’d got by using his charms. He flattered women into feeding him. He was masterly at turning up at mealtimes, looking surprised and a bit embarrassed to see a table being set and food being brought out of the oven. But it never took a lot of persuading to make him sit down and join in the eating.
He wouldn’t have much money, Sophie supposed. And she was sure that Duncan spent a lot of what he did have in pubs and on clothes. Well, a charmer needed to be well turned out.
It didn’t really bother Sophie that she was being charmed for a bowl of soup. In fact she was rather flattered. A man with Duncan’s looks and wardrobe could surely have found a more sophisticated and wealthier woman to flatter. She imagined herself to be on a long list of fascinating females. This might have been flattering if she didn’t think that Duncan was getting old and losing his powers. Captivating young, rich and beautiful women was getting beyond him. If he’d been a woman, he’d have been called a gold digger. But he wasn’t interested in money, really. He certainly wasn’t a sugar daddy. Men had to be rich to merit that title. After careful consideration, Sophie concluded he was a soup digger. He was after a warm kitchen and comfort food.
He never patronised her. He never overly praised the meals he ate. He was kind and considerate. And Sophie was glad of his company. It was good for her morale to be seen out and about with a nattily dressed man.
Today she offered him tomato and leek soup and toasted cheese. She reckoned the vegetables would do him good. Plus there was fibre in the wholemeal bread and protein in the cheese. ‘Ach,’ she scolded herself, ‘why should I care if the man lives on take-aways. All this nurturing has to stop. Too much thinking and worrying about others and forgetting about myself.’ But she couldn’t help it. She imagined the poor man’s arteries clogging, his heart struggling as he sat at her table. Cholesterol was having its way with him.
He told her the food was wonderful, raised his hands in awe at the Mona Lisa cake and said he was looking forward to their walk. It was a lovely day out. After their initial spurt, when they’d slowed to an amble, Sophie asked Duncan why he thought Jamie had left Martha so abruptly.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there could be many reasons. Boredom. Fear. Curiosity.’
‘Curiosity?’
‘If Martha had been his childhood sweetheart, he probably had started to wonder what other women were like. To kiss, to hold, to have in his bed.’
‘You think he left her for another woman?’
‘It’s a possibility. If he’s still in town it could be he simply traded one married life for another. Maybe the other woman offered him something Martha didn’t.’
‘Careful what you say about my Martha.’
‘Oh, I didn’t mean anything sexual. I didn’t mean to imply your daughter isn’t a lusty and willing lover.’
‘Please, we’ll have none of that talk. A parent doesn’t like to think of their child doing naughty sexy things. Though I suppose they must.’
‘I was thinking maybe Jamie hooked up with someone who offered him a way out of the job he hated. Offered him a more glamorous life.’
‘You think he met a rich woman.’
‘Something like that. He met someone who woke him up to his dreams. After all, he’d had an exciting time being on the road with Martha’s band. Then suddenly he was a father living in a small rented house working at something that didn’t interest him. I think someone turned his head.’
‘He thought he’d found something better than life with my Martha and my Evie.’
‘Some men are like that,’ said Duncan. ‘Always on the lookout for the main chance. Always hoping for a cheap ticket to easy street.’
‘The bastard,’ said Sophie. ‘They could have worked it out. People do. Everybody knows that it can be awful being newly married with a child. Suddenly you’re not young and free any more. And you’ve hardly any money. It can be a shock.’
Duncan supposed it could be.
‘It certainly was for Martin and me. The whole baby business took us by storm. It was nappies and feeds and washing and sterilising bottles and making more feeds and washing more nappies and never getting enough sleep. Stumbling about in grubby clothes, living on bacon sandwiches while the baby lies in a pristine cot wearing pristine clothes. Then there was the crying. We dreaded that. We loved Martha, adored her, boasted about her, doted and wept with joy over her. But we had a running-away rota to get away from her. One week it was me. Next it was him.’
‘That sounds awful. It’s a wonder the human race survives.’
‘I’ve wondered about that, too. Still, it bonded Martin and me. We took comfort from knowing that if one ran away, the other understood.’
‘Did you do it?’
‘Of course not,’ said Sophie. ‘I couldn’t have done that. Neither could Martin.’
But Jamie had. Sophie always wondered how Martha coped with it. How did it feel to see your husband actually taking flight and hurtling away from you? She’d just told him they were expecting a second child and he didn’t take her in his arms and kiss her and tell her how wonderful, clever and precious she was. Oh no, he fled. Sophie pictured him waving his arms as he sprinted away, screaming, ‘Nooo.’
‘Yes, Jamie was a bit of a bastard in the end,’ she said.
Duncan agreed. ‘A bit of a rogue. One of those people who don’t think twice about using others to get what they want. Or even what they think they want. Oh yes, there are rogues about.’
Sophie rammed her hands into her pockets, scowled out to sea and thought, it takes one to know one.
22
She’ll Always Remember You
Martha knew that in life good things and bad things come in clusters. A person went humming along doing their day-to-day things – going to work, coming home again, eating, watching television, bed, sleep and then up again and work again. Something wonderful would happen – they’d fall in love or win a prize or spot a bargain in a sale. It wouldn’t be an isolated splash of fortune, other good things would come along before life’s routine hum returned.
It was the same with terrible things; disasters arrived in a series of black days. Horrible thing followed by horrible thing, like Jamie suddenly leaving and then a miscarriage. So, when one relatively small catastrophe happened, Martha prepared herself for the worst.
Charlie was somewhere in town following Brendan Stokes. He’d complained about this. It wasn’t the sort of thing he did. ‘I don’t follow people about. It isn’t polite. It’s not the sort of detecting I do. I think. I muse. I use my instincts. I’m good at musing.’
‘I noticed,’ said Martha.
He was wearing a grey collarless shirt and a darker grey jacket. ‘Do I look inconspicuous?’
‘Only slightly.’ There was something about him that drew the eye.
‘Only, I don’t want to be noticed. If someone notices you following them they’re going to get upset. They could punch you. I hate getting punched. It hurts.’
‘Have you been punched often?’
‘I’ve been punched. Not often. But enough to know I don’t want to get punched again.’
‘Understandable,’ said Martha.
‘You are sounding flippant. You have no idea about being punched. It can leave you reeling, gasping with pain and shock. You just stand hurting so much you can’t think, mouth open as you try to remember how to breathe and work at not vomiting.’
Martha nodded. In fact she knew a little about being punched. There had been catfights on the road. They erupted, swift and vicious and noisy. Martha had found them ugly and the sudden fierce bodily contact embarrassing. She winced, remembering. She’d spent about eighteen months on the road, hardly any time at all. Now she fel
t sure she’d spend the rest of her life squirming at her memories.
‘Well, I’m off then,’ said Charlie. ‘Take Murphy out at lunchtime, will you? And check the gas is off and the fireguard is up.’
‘Will do.’
He left. Martha sat, waiting. Charlie returned. ‘You will remember about the gas?’
‘And the fireguard. Of course.’ Martha nodded.
Charlie lingered at the door. ‘Promise.’
‘I promise.’ She listened to him walk down the corridor and out into the street.
‘He’s gone,’ she told Murphy. ‘Didn’t keep coming back to check that I’d check the gas and fireguard. He must be preoccupied. Dreading doing a bit of shadowing, or tailing as proper detectives say.’
She spent her morning chasing Chrissie Lewis. She phoned all the numbers on Ted’s list. Chrissie, she discovered, was an intriguing and elusive woman. All these years after her disappearance rumours about what had happened to her still flew. One or two of the people Martha got in touch with thought that Chrissie had run off with Ted’s money; a few were surprised she hadn’t run off sooner than she did. One woman thought Chrissie was in London, another thought she’d taken up doing something somewhere in South America. Others thought Ted should forget about Chrissie and get on with his life. At least what was left of it.
Martha’s tenth call was to Wendy Jenkins, who was marked on Ted’s list as a friend. But one I disapproved of, a bad influence he’d written. Martha thought this hopeful. She approved of people who were disapproved of. Being a bad influence was to be admired, she thought. Once she’d been considered to be a bad influence. Grace’s father had loudly declared Martha an appalling young woman who looked like a female thug in her leather jacket and jeans. She punched the air. She was rather proud of that.