Gone Away Read online

  I put the car away and started to make myself a snack lunch

  – all I needed after the nuts and olives and cheese straws. As I chopped up mushrooms and tomatoes to fry up with some cold mashed potato, my mind was squirrelling round as I tried for the umpteenth time to find some logical explanation of the affair. What did I actually know? Lee had been in the office on Monday 2 January, when she’d had the mysterious phone call that Carol had overheard. She had said she was going away the next day, presumably to meet Jay, whoever he was, at Wringcliff Bay, and she hadn’t been seen since. It was to be a secret meeting of some sort because she hadn’t wanted Carol to know about it. Presumably that phone call was the one she had been expecting ever since she had got back from America. ‘Nervy’, Carol had said, so it must have been important to her as well as secret. Was it something to do with the dubious business dealings, or was it more personal, something to do with her forthcoming marriage to Charles, a marriage that was, one would have though, going to solve all her problem?

  Wringcliff Bay. Why should she meet anyone there? It was an isolated spot, especially in the depths of winter, so obviously there was some good reason why she didn’t want to be seen with Jay.

  A peremptory bark brought me back to the present and I went to the back door to let Tris in, and then got on with my lunch. I tried to put the problem to one side, but like those twinges of rheumatism that I get nowadays, it remained with me, just below the level of my consciousness, slight but persistent, all day.

  Charles phoned again that evening, though at a more civilised hour than last time.

  ‘Well, Sheila, what have you found out? Where is she? What’s happened?’

  I hesitated. There was so little to tell, really. Nothing concrete, that is, only an accumulation of little incidents and a general feeling of puzzlement and unease, and that was not what Charles wanted to hear. He liked facts, carefully marshalled and preferably on paper.

  ‘She’s not at Country Houses.’ I said cautiously, ‘and they don’t seem to know when she’ll be back. And she hasn’t been in her flat for quite a while.’

  ‘But where is she?’

  ‘My dear Charles,’ I replied with some asperity, ‘that’s what I have spent a great deal of time trying to find out, but I still can’t get any sort of lead.’

  For some reason, I didn’t feel I could tell him about Jay and the phone call, partly because I felt sure he wouldn’t know who Jay was anyway, partly to protect Carol, but mostly, quite irrationally, I felt I must protect Lee herself, who obviously didn’t want Charles to know anything about it. This was ridiculous, since Charles was an old and dear friend and I didn’t even like Lee, but there was a sort of instinct, a freemasonry of women, perhaps, that made me keep silent.

  ‘Charles.’ I said suddenly, ‘was Lee in any sort of financial trouble?’

  He hesitated for a moment. ‘Well, I suppose I can tell you. There was a sort of cash-flow problem.’ Lee’s word had been ‘static’. ‘As a matter of fact, I lent her some money. Not a vast amount, about fifty thousand dollars.’

  That certainly seemed a vast amount of money to me, though it was dollars rather than pounds, and to someone like Charles who was used to dealing in multi-national millions I suppose it wasn’t a lot. Still – I remembered Roger’s phrase about ‘a strategic withdrawal’ sometimes being necessary in fraud cases.

  ‘Well, I suppose it wasn’t a loan exactly,’ Charles said. ‘After all, I’m going to be her partner in the firm, so I suppose you might call it an investment.’

  There was just a hint of defiance in his voice, a slight defensiveness in case I should think that he was just another gullible man who had been taken in by an attractive woman, in spite of his business acumen and sophisticated life-style. Was this, then, the simple explanation? I wondered. Just take the money and run? But that would be very short-sighted. Charles was a rich man, and there was a great deal more money where that first instalment had come from. Lee was no fool, and when we had talked together she had certainly seemed determined to marry Charles.

  ‘Oh, well, yes, I do see that,’ I said hastily. ‘Any-way, I really can’t tell you any more. I’ll keep my eyes open and ask around. I’m sorry, Charles, I know this must be dreadfully worrying and frustrating for you, being so far away.’

  ‘I wish to God I could get over myself,’ he said, ‘but I have to be in Rio next week to negotiate this concession – my job depends on it...’

  I wondered, if I were in Charles’s position, whether I’d have dropped everything and simply come back to Taviscombe. I expect I would, but then I am not a man, and a business man at that, and if Charles lost his job Lee wouldn’t want to marry him anyway.

  Charles’s voice broke in on my profitless speculations.

  ‘Please do what you can, Sheila. It means an awful lot to me and you are the only person I can trust to make enquiries

  – the others wouldn’t understand. But you have always been so splendid...’

  I assured Charles that I would continue to do what I could to find Lee and put the receiver down with the word ‘splendid’ still echoing in my ears.

  What on earth was I doing, I asked myself resent-fully, expending all this time and energy on some-thing that, ultimately, didn’t concern me? Because I am ‘splendid’ and can be relied on to do things for other people? Lee meant nothing to me, and although Charles is an old friend and I am fond of him – was more than fond in my early youth – why should I allow this to become almost an obsession?

  ‘Because you are a fool!’ I said out loud. Tris, who was sleeping at my feet, raised his head and looked at me in surprise. But I knew, really, the main reason I was trying to help Charles solve his mystery. All my life I have loved ‘finding out’ about people and speculating about their lives, so that sometimes it seems that I live vicariously other people’s lives more intensely than my own. From a very early age I have always invented stories about people I have known only by sight, who have caught my attention in some way. And sometimes I have ‘investigate.’ them – in my youth even shadowing them in the street, like a private detective in fiction – finding out about them obliquely from other sources, looking them up in directories or registers. It began as a sort of game, but over the years it has become part of the fabric of my life, adding a kind of richness. If I were a novelist or an anthropologist I could have called it collecting copy or doing fieldwork, but since I am neither I suppose other people would regard it as an unnatural curiosity. Peter had always been amused at my ‘sagas’, as we used to call them, and as he gradually became more inactive and housebound he too used to join in my speculations, bringing his legal mind to bear on logical explanations for unusual behaviour in our various subjects. It was a source of harmless amusement to us in those later days of his illness. Since his death I hadn’t had the heart to embark on another saga, and Lee’s disappearance was, I suppose, a sort of substitute, an extension of our fantasies.

  The next day brought no answer to the problem, but I briskly told myself that something would turn up and that in a small town like Taviscombe someone would have noticed something. Mother used to say with a kind of wry resignation that whatever you do in a small seaside town, and even more so in the countryside around, there will always be someone watching! This is a fact that people from the towns, crowded and anonymous, never seem to understand.

  I enjoy supermarket shopping in the winter. Ours is a vast and cathedral-like store, designed really, I suppose, for the jostling crowds of summer visitors with trolleys crammed with hamburgers, crisps and cans of lager for their self-catering holidays, and their attendant children, alternately grizzling for chocolate or playing noisy games of tag around the frozen-food cabinets. Out of season there is a feeling of space and quiet, so that one can stand motionless in unseeing contemplation of rows of tinned fruit, one’s thoughts miles away. It is all very restful.

  I had come to rest in just such a fashion when a voice behind me exclaimed, ‘Sheila! What lu
ck seeing you here. I was going to ring you.’ It was Anthea, unexpectedly sun-tanned and very chatty. ‘Ronnie and I have been in Malta for ten days and we’re longing to tell somebody all about it. We wondered if you’d like to come to dinner next week – Ronnie’s cousin from Inverness is staying and I know he’d love to see you again.’

  I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Now that I was a widow Anthea felt it necessary to provide a spare man when she invited me to dinner, not perhaps with a view to matchmaking, but more from a need to ‘make up the numbers’ in an old-fashioned way. I remembered Ronnie’s cousin from Inverness from other such occasions – a dim little man, interested only in bridge and golf and obviously contemptuous of me when I disclaimed knowledge of either of these pastimes.

  ‘How splendid.’ I said insincerely, ‘I’d love to come.’

  Apparently inspired by this, Anthea pulled a can of lychees from the shelf and put it in her trolley.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said suddenly. ‘I knew there was something. Poor old Charles had better look out!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked sharply.

  ‘Well, that Lee woman. We saw her with another man, miles from anywhere. They seemed very involved, he had his hand on her arm’

  ‘Where was this and when?’

  ‘Oh, just before we went away, the first week in January – yes that’s right, it was the Tuesday. We were on our way to have lunch with my sister – you remember Helen, she lives in Barnstaple, her eldest daughter’s a physiotherapist. Tuesdays are the best day for her. Anyway, since it’s winter and all those dreadful tourists have gone, we thought we’d go along that little coast road. Well, I mean, you can’t do that in the summer

  – the road’s so narrow you have to keep backing all the time, what with all the cars trying to get through to Ilfracombe. As Ronnie says, there really ought to be a signpost saying that it’s not a through road. It’s downright dangerous with that sheer drop to the sea on one side, and most of the visitors haven’t the least idea of backing a car – well, I suppose they never have to in the town – they try to squeeze past in the most impossible places. Honestly, it makes my blood run cold, and Ronnie’s language—’

  ‘But what about Lee?’

  ‘Lee? Oh yes, well, as I was saying, we were driving along that coast road and you know the bit just beyond the Valley of Rocks, it’s all wooded and there’s an open bit where you can get on to the cliffs – it’s a glorious view, with the sea miles below and all those rocks and that little bay, what’s it called? Anyway, that Jaguar of hers was parked in the passing place there, and a Land Rover, and there was Lee and this man walking along the cliff-top, and just as we passed he put his hand on her arm, like I said. I wanted to stop but Ronnie wouldn’t – men are so stuffy about that sort of thing – so I couldn’t see any more.’ she finished regretfully.

  ‘How did she look?’ I asked.

  ‘Look? Well, I don’t know the woman all that well. Actually though, now I come to think of it, she did look a bit agitated. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? I mean, carrying on like that when she’s supposed to be practically engaged to Charles, and a car coming by – you wouldn’t expect any traffic along that road at this time of the year. Not that she could have seen who was in it, but for all she knew it might have been someone who would tell Charles what she was up to, and then where would all her scheming to catch him get her!’

  ‘How do you mean, agitated?’

  ‘Well, she shook off his arm quite violently. But then, if you lead a man on you should know what to expect. She’s no innocent girl!’

  Anthea’s voice took on a shrill note and I found myself perversely disliking her for her dislike of Lee.

  1 felt I needed time and solitude to take in what Anthea had told me, so I simply said, ‘Goodness, how extraordinary!' and turned my shopping trolley as if to move away.

  ‘You’re more in touch with Charles than the rest of us,’ Anthea said. ‘I do think you ought to tell him about it. I told Ronnie someone should but he said it was none of our business, but I think Charles should know what’s going on behind his back.’

  I made some noncommittal sound.

  ‘Anyway,’ Anthea reverted to her original theme, ‘do come to dinner. Next Friday, about seven for seven thirty.’

  ‘Thank you, I’ll look forward to it.’

  Thankfully, I moved across to the checkout, although I had by no means finished my shopping, but I had to get away from Anthea’s chatter and try to sort things out in my own mind.

  I walked down the Avenue, past the shops that in the summer sold gifts and cheap clothing, now shuttered and empty. A few of the windows had lettering scrawled across them: ‘GREAT CLOSING DOWN SALE’, ‘FINAL REDUCTIONS’. There was something sad, even pathetic, about them, on a grey afternoon when the light was beginning to fade and the world seemed at a very low ebb. I was overcome by a feeling of melancholy, a sort of dragging down of the spirits, and I walked slowly towards the sea-wall. In times of sadness or stress, or even of bewilderment, I always go down and look at the sea. I rested my shopping bag on the wall and looked at the waves creaming across the sand and breaking on the shingle and at the sea-birds dipping and delving at the water’s edge. The lights were coming on on the far side of Taviscombe Bay, and across the Bristol Channel there were smudges of light that were Port Talbot and Margam in Wales.

  So Jay was a man and Lee had met him as she had arranged. But what sort of meeting had it been? Anthea’s description of Lee violently shaking off his arm made me wonder if there had been some sort of struggle. I remembered that stretch of coast very well. We used to go to Wringcliff Bay for picnics when I was a child and my father was still alive. It was a beautiful little bay, quite secluded, and summer visitors never seemed to find it. I suppose the path down was too steep and overhung with brambles and wild clematis for them to take the trouble.

  One summer, when I was about seven, we had made our way happily down to the beach and I was wandering along the shore looking for shells while my parents were unpacking the picnic basket. I rounded a rock and suddenly came upon the body of a goat. The wild goats who lived along that part of the coast were famous, and I loved to watch them delicately picking their way along the rocky cliff-face. It appeared from the stones lying around the body that part of the cliff had given way, and the goat had fallen on to the rocks below. I had never seen death before but I knew immediately that the creature was dead. In the one look that I had taken before I turned, shuddering, away, I had seen that its creamy fawn coat was matted with blood and that the scavenging birds had already begun their work.

  I went back to my parents but I didn’t tell them what I had seen. Somehow it seemed too private and personal a grief to share with anyone. I ate very little of our picnic tea, and as we climbed up the cliff-path I looked down and was just able to make out the pathetic little body lying on the sand. Looking across Taviscombe sands with the gulls crying, as they had done on that day long ago, the picture came back to me, but this time it was Lee’s body that I saw, with the birds wheeling above it.

  Chapter Four

  I awoke early next morning, and somehow it seemed best to get up and do prosaic jobs about the house to distract my mind from a growing sense of unease. I deliberately chose my least favourite tasks – scrubbing out the kitchen bin and putting in a new plastic bag, scraping the burnt bits from underneath the grill in the cooker, and, finally, in a burst of energy, cleaning the stairs with that infuriating vacuum attachment that winds itself round your legs like an insidious python. But all the time I was working I couldn’t get out of my head the picture of Lee struggling with a man on the edge of the path leading down to Wringcliff Bay.

  I switched off the vacuum, and Tris and Foss, who both hate it, materialised and demanded food. As I was opening tins, I made a sudden decision. I would rid my mind of all my silly fancies by driving over to Wringcliff Bay and assuring myself that of course there was no body lying on the beach. It was a nice bright morni
ng, and not as cold as it had been for the last few weeks, so it would be a pleasant little outing.

  As I drove along the lanes I saw a figure on a horse, and as I approached I realised that it was Marjorie Fraser. She always looked unexpectedly elegant in her neatly tied stock, navy jacket, cream breeches and beautiful leather boots. From the formality of her attire I gathered that she was going hunting – she had been complaining the other day that the ground had been too hard to get out since the New Year. I slowed down and drove very slowly and cautiously round her, since her horse was backing and sidling in what one writer has called ‘the divinely silly way’ of horses. I waved as I passed, and she touched the peak of her cap with her riding crop and smiled at me. She really was quite a different person when she was on a horse, relaxed, cheerful and friendly, and I pondered, not for the first time, on the strange complexity of all human beings.

  As I came up to the top of Porlock Hill I saw that the hunt was already assembling. Since I was born and brought up in hunting country I know all the arguments, for and against, but, being a fool about animals, I must say that I can’t bear to think of any animal being hunted, for whatever reason. And yet ... Whenever I actually see the hunt, as I did that morning, I can’t resist stopping to have a look and to admire the picture they make – the beauty of the horses, the elegance of the riders and the fascination of the questing hounds. And if I catch a glimpse of them in full flight, strung out across the bracken-covered hillside, then I get an irrational thrill and a sort of aesthetic pleasure.

  As I drove along the main coast road towards Lynton I came to the turning Lee had taken on that last morning I had seen her, the turning to Plover’s Barrow. On an impulse, I turned left along it and made my way through the narrow lanes until I came to the entrance to the drive. Feeling rather foolish, and wondering what I would do if anyone appeared and challenged my right to be there, I drove on towards the house. I caught a glimpse of the chimneys through the bare branches of the trees, and then something that made me catch my breath sharply. Parked in front of the house was Lee’s green Jaguar.