by Anita Waller
‘It already is. It doesn’t need our hacking skills to help that. But before you can hack into anything, I’d have to teach you how to do a bit more than simply turning on a computer. So shall we go inside and make these calls, or do you want to stay out here?’
‘We’ll go inside. You go into the lounge where you’ve got the laptop set up, and I’ll use the kitchen table. We don’t want whoever we’re calling to think it’s a con because they can hear another conversation. I’ll need some paper and a pencil.’ Wendy looked down her list. ‘None of the bigger places?’
‘No, Rosie had already done them. Shirley’s not going to go to one of those anyway, because Mark would be able to track her down. The big ones are easy to locate. He’ll not take the trouble to do what we’re doing.’
Wendy placed Belle on the seat at the side of her. There was a loud miaow to show her displeasure, but after a quick head stroke from Wendy she ignored the disappearance of her slaves and settled back down to snooze.
Wendy pulled a sheet of paper towards her, picked up her phone and rang the first number. ‘Oh, hello. I wonder if you can help me. I’ve been trying to contact my daughter but her phone keeps going to voicemail. She’s either in a bad reception area, or her phone is broken, which is perfectly normal for her. Last time this happened she’d dropped it into a pint of lager. She’s having a few days’ break from work, and she’s walking in your area, but she didn’t tell me where she was staying because she didn’t pre-book, she booked when she got there and I need to speak to her urgently. Her name is Shirley Ledger.’
‘I’m so sorry, but we can’t give out information about our guests.’
‘I know, but she’s left her dog with me and yesterday I had to take him to the vets. He was poorly, and the vet says he needs to be put to sleep. He has a huge tumour. I can’t take that decision without her knowing first…’
There was a moment’s pause. ‘One moment, Mrs…?’
‘Lucas, Wendy Lucas. My daughter, as I said, is Shirley Ledger.’
‘I’m not supposed to do this, but I’ll look for you. If she is here, I can leave her a message to contact you.’
‘Thank you so much.’
There was a couple of minutes’ silence and the receptionist came back on. ‘No, Mrs Lucas, I’m sorry. She isn’t here. There are a couple of small bed and breakfast places I know of, if you’d like their numbers.’
‘Thank you. I would. I really don’t know what to do about poor Cujo.’
‘Cujo?’
‘My daughter has a warped sense of humour. He’s a black curly-haired poodle. Those numbers?’
Wendy wrote down the names of the other bed and breakfast locations, along with their numbers, and said goodbye. She also wrote down details of Cujo. After crossing out the hotel, she started a new list for any other suggestions that might crop up once she’d got every receptionist in the area concerned for poor Cujo.
‘Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant, Wendy Lucas. Who knew you could lie with such conviction?’ Doris clapped her hands. ‘I had no luck with my first one, data protection flying around in spades, and I could hear you rattling on as though you were best friends. So we’ve got a dog called Cujo?’
‘We have. He’s a black curly-haired poodle with a tumour. Vet’s going to put him to sleep tomorrow but I need to tell my daughter about it.’
‘Oh, bless. Poor dog. I take it Shirley wasn’t there.’
‘Not under her own name. The receptionist gave me a couple of B and Bs to try, so I’ve written them on a separate sheet in case we haven’t already got them. Didn’t they teach you at your fancy MI5 or MI6 or MI whatever that if you bring an animal into it you’re on a winner straight away?’
Doris laughed. ‘It’s the talking I don’t like. I can send off an email with thousands of words on it, invent a million Cujos on paper, but talking to people I usually keep short and sweet. After listening to an expert, I now know I was wrong. Dropping a phone in a pint of lager indeed. I think that’s what swung it for you.’
‘I did.’
‘You did what?’
‘Dropped my last phone in a pint of lager. A full pint. I tell you, Doris, no amount of bloody rice could dry that one out. That’s why I’ve got this one that I don’t know how to work.’
‘What did you do with the lager?’
‘Drank it.’ Wendy’s tone suggested it was a stupid question.
‘Right,’ Doris said, keeping her face straight. ‘I’ll go back into the other room. It’s not good to be around anyone who’s probably highly radioactive.’
She held the smile in until she reached the lounge, and then she heard a strangled ‘What…?’ from the kitchen. She gave in to laughter.
17
Identifying Melanie had drained him. Patrick acknowledged it, grabbed a beer from the fridge and went to lie down. His sleep the previous night had been sporadic and light because he knew what was to face him the next day. Take what time you need, work had said. If he took them at their word he would still be at home in six months’ time.
He puffed up the pillow and stood it against the headboard, then sat with his back against it. He popped the ring pull on the can and took a long slow drink. His fingers reached across to the other side of the bed, and he stroked her pillow. Her silk nightie was underneath it, and he lifted it up to his face, rubbing it against the two days of stubble on his chin. The smell of her calmed him in one way, but brought tears.
‘Why, Mel, why?’ he whispered. ‘So many plans…’
He placed the can of beer on the bedside table, yanked at his pillow to lower it onto the bed, and hugged the nightie in his arms. Sleep came quickly, but his daytime dreams were as strong as his night ones and his nap was as light as it could possibly be.
He heard the key in the door, and for a moment he thought it was Melanie coming home: for a moment. Reality hit and he called out, ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me, bro. You okay?’
‘I’m upstairs, Mark. Put the kettle on, will you? I’ll be down in a minute.’
Patrick heard Mark turn on the tap to fill the kettle, so he swung his legs off the bed, tucked the nightie under his own pillow and took a sip of the beer. It tasted disgustingly flat, so he took it and poured it down the bathroom sink before splashing his face with water.
His legs felt stiff, and he went downstairs carefully, carrying the empty beer can.
Mark lifted his head as Patrick walked into the kitchen. He raised his eyebrows. ‘You want tea or beer?’
‘Tea. I’ve poured this away, it went flat.’
‘How did it go?’
‘This morning? How do you expect? I hope I never have to do anything like it ever again. It was Mel, but it wasn’t. I’m glad you didn’t go with me, at least one of us can still see Mel as she was and not the white-faced body on that table. I’d asked her to marry me, you know.’
‘And she said yes?’
‘She did. We decided to go out on the Sunday and choose her ring together, then announce it to everyone. She didn’t live long enough to get to the Sunday.’
Mark handed him a cup of tea, and they moved into the lounge. His backpack was standing by the side of the sofa. ‘I’ve brought some stuff in case you want me to stay tonight, and I’ve told Rosie where I am.’
‘How did the boys take it?’
‘Devastated to lose Aunty Melanie, and talking about coming home so they can help search for Shirley. In the end they decided to stay at school. They had their iPads stolen by two louts from year nine, but that’s been sorted.’
‘For God’s sake, Mark, get them out of that school. Shirley doesn’t want them there, and they’ve hated it from the first day. It did you no good, and it will certainly be bad for Adam and Seth.’
‘It’s not the same headmaster, this one seems okay.’
‘You’re not listening, Mark. Get those lads out, and send them somewhere normal, somewhere where they can see their mum every day. If you don’t, you’ll lose them li
ke Mum and Dad lost you. By the time it was my turn to go there, they’d realised their mistake, thank God. And if you don’t let Shirley have her boys back, she’ll take them. Then you’ll have lost everything.’
Mark shrugged. ‘Maybe that might be for the best. She can take the kids and go, as long as I get the house.’
‘You’d trade your kids and marriage for a house? For fuck’s sake, Mark, open your eyes.’
The look of disgust that passed from younger brother to older brother stopped Mark from saying anything else, but on the way over to Patrick’s it had occurred to him how much easier life was without the encumbrance of wife and children.
Maybe he shouldn’t have voiced those thoughts out loud.
Shirley’s diary lay on the kitchen table, unopened. Rosie stared into the far distance, trying to gather her thoughts. She knew without any doubt that when Shirley came back, she would do everything within her power to get her out of the poisonous atmosphere in that house. In the meantime, while they waited for Shirley’s reappearance, she would ask Mark if the boys could come to her for the upcoming school holiday; they would be company for Megan, who she knew would value bossing-around time.
She picked up her coffee and took a long drink before opening the first page.
Shirley Ledger. It was as simple as that. No address, no mobile number, no name on the ‘next of kin’ line. Rosie ran her finger over her sister’s name, and sighed. Loneliness oozed out of the little book.
She carefully picked her way through each page, wanting to cry at the annotations that said helped Rosie to make some notebooks. The reality of the matter was that she didn’t, Shirley was the clever one, the talented side of the partnership who experimented and created, advertised, corrected Rosie’s work when she struggled on the days when the pain from fibromyalgia didn’t let her do all she wanted to do. It was obvious that this was Shirley’s way of making a note of her work days; she didn’t want Mark reading through this and finding out she had a life away from him.
There were appointments; doctor in February, dentist in April – she had a face the size of a melon after that visit – hairdressers also in April, and one that simply said ME, 2.30. That was dated the third of April, but it gave no indication of what it meant. Rosie smiled. Was it a tiny rebellion on Shirley’s part? Was she kicking back at her time being constantly needed for others? Did it simply mean that at 2.30 on that day Shirley had kicked off her shoes, switched off her phone, locked the door and laid down on the bed or the sofa with a book? Rosie hoped so.
So what had she really done with this ME time? Rosie flicked through the rest of the diary, but nothing else showed up. All the visits to the boys had been inserted, written in red with a little heart drawn by the side of each boy’s name. School holidays were in green. Rosie laughed at the thought of her organised sister with one of those pens where you pushed the colour up from the bottom, depending on which of the six colours available you needed at that moment in time.
She trawled through the little book twice but apart from the strange ME annotation there was nothing out of the ordinary. There was a section for notes at the end of the main part of the diary, and Rosie ran her finger down the inner seam to hold the two sections flatter on the table.
The notes said little. The measurements for their Pearl Journal had been written down because they had decided that it had to be uniform – it was their top seller. She had made notes of the ribbon used as standard, then underneath she had written SAL wants a fuchsia ribbon. They were used to special requests for personalisation, and Shirley must have taken this one when away from a computer.
Rosie flipped over to the addresses, read each one carefully, although it didn’t take long. Shirley had minimal friends that she kept in touch with. Rosie sighed. Where was the Shirley who left school full of life, had far more friends than she had, and buzzing to get on with her future? She wasn’t in the pages of this book, that was for sure.
She read down all the names and addresses, reaching the I/J page quickly. She hesitated and flipped back a page. Enid Hill.
Enid was an ex-teacher of theirs and had ordered a Victorian journal for her granddaughter for her twenty-first birthday. Rosie had packaged it up and left it for Shirley to drop it in at the post office on her way home, but Shirley had said she would hand deliver it as it was only the next village.
She had been insistent.
The Rothery address in Shirley’s book didn’t match Enid’s Woodbridge address in the computer files, and Rosie knew the details on the package were correct because they had visited Enid to show her samples so that she could choose which one she wanted. She definitely lived in Woodbridge.
Strange. She stuck a Post-it note on the page, a flash of bright yellow lighting up the navy-blue diary. She looked through the rest of the addresses and found nothing unusual.
She picked up her phone as soon as the first peal of the ringtone began.
‘Doris? Any news?’
‘Maybe… I’m not sure. Did you manage to find Shirley’s diary?’
‘I did. I used the gloves to read through it, because I’m going to put it back. I don’t think there’s anything in it…’
‘There is something?’
‘A little niggle.’
‘Okay, we’ll come over and see if it niggles us. Then you can put it back because the police will want to check the house soon if Shirley doesn’t turn up. That diary needs to be back there by then. We’ll be there in about an hour.’
Wendy lifted her head. ‘Thirty-nine phone calls and we only got one who was unhelpful. Did that one niggle you? It seems both you and Rosie have niggles.’
‘It did. She was too abrupt. Didn’t want to listen about the poorly dog, she wanted me off that phone. And it’s half a mile away from the school where Shirley’s boys are. Rosie has the diary, so I said we’d get out there and have a powwow.’
‘Powwow. Do I need a feathered headdress? Always fancied being a Red Indian.’
‘You’re a nut job, Wendy Lucas. Can you top up the cat food, please, in case we’re late home? I’ll take my laptop with me, along with these indecipherable notes you’ve made.’
‘Oy,’ Wendy said. ‘I understand them.’
‘It’s why I’m taking you. Only you could make any sense of them. Come on, let’s go see this diary and talk through where we go next.’
18
Rosie poured coffees for the four of them – Megan insisted she needed to be there – and the diary was opened.
‘There is little in it that would make alarm bells ring, except for where I’ve marked it.’ There were three yellow Post-it notes standing up from the top edge of the book. Rosie pushed it across to Doris. ‘I’ve photocopied all of it.’
Doris frowned as she read the cryptic ME 2.30. ‘An appointment with someone with the initials ME?’
Rosie laughed. ‘And that’s why I’m not an investigator. I read it as Shirley booking some me-time for herself. Possibly shutting the world out and reading a book or something. You saw it as something mysterious, a meeting with… oh, I don’t know, Michael Elphick!’
‘Michael Elphick? Does she know him?’ Doris tried to keep her face straight.
Wendy didn’t even bother. She spluttered. ‘Michael Elphick died about twenty years ago, don’t think she’s meeting him.’
Rosie grinned. ‘First celebrity I could think of with those initials. So we simply have to work out who has those initials, and we’ve cracked it?’
‘Hardly. ME hasn’t necessarily spirited her away. In fact, it may mean nothing at all. How’s her health? Could it be some sort of specialist appointment?’
‘As far as I know she’s healthy. I’ve never seen any sign of illness, and she’s certainly never mentioned anything,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s a lot quieter than she used to be, but that’s Markitis. Divorce would cure that.’
‘So, the next one. SAL wants a fuchsia ribbon.’ Doris waited for comments.
Rosie stood and went into
the lounge, returning a minute later with a thick journal, covered in lace, vintage pictures, and filled with tags, pockets and all sorts of other ephemera. ‘This is our best seller,’ she explained. ‘The measurements on that page are the ones we use for every one we send out, and our standard ribbon fastening is sari silk in a pale green. However, we will always personalise, and if someone wants a fuchsia ribbon, it’s not a problem. It would be noted on the computer. It seemed odd that she’d made a note in her diary, when nothing else to do with the business is in there.’
Wendy took the journal from Rosie and stroked the front. ‘How beautiful. You couldn’t buy this in a shop.’
‘That one we’ve never put up for sale. It’s our prototype, it’s the one we show to clients who want a personalised one, and we make their journal to their instructions. I don’t know who Sal is, or if she got her fuchsia ribbon.’
‘Mark knows she helps you, but he believes it’s your venture. Am I right?’
Rosie nodded. ‘We have to do it like that. He doesn’t know it’s a business, we have a fifty per cent share each. And it’s a good growing concern. We’ll never be Richard Bransons, but we do okay. Shirley is our super-talented designer.’
‘Then I suspect this is nothing whatsoever to do with fuchsia ribbons. It’s a reminder of something to her that will mean nothing to Mark. He’d take it at face value as you have. Sal wants a fuchsia ribbon on her journal. Tell me, does Shirley have a middle name?’
‘Anne.’
SAL. Shirley Anne Ledger. We need to work out what the significance is of the fuchsia bit. Thoughts?’
Megan had sat quietly, listening to the adults talking about her Aunty Shirley, not wanting to interrupt. She put up her hand, and the three ladies laughed.
‘Megs, you’re not in school,’ her mother said. ‘Just speak.’
‘We, it’s… could it be a road?’
‘Fuchsia Ribbon Road?’