A Kind of Vanishing

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘Let them get on with their job.’

  ‘I was only putting them right.’

  ‘They don’t need putting right.’

  ‘She never went there.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’ Steve was steely and brutal.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She went there last Saturday with that Eleanor Ramsay.’

  ‘But she was last seen on Tuesday afternoon in the lane near the Ramsays’ house.’ Kathleen robotically spoke in a newspaper phrase.

  ‘So, it means she knew about the place.’ He had kept close to her, perhaps already concerned that the police should guess how disturbed she was. Maybe he thought they would try less hard to find Alice if they thought her mother was unbalanced. Or was it that he worried that seeing this, the police might blame Kathleen, as Steve already blamed her, for their daughter’s vanishing?

  ‘She went the day after you first took her to meet those Ramsays.’

  ‘Alice would have told me.’

  ‘She told me.’

  ‘She what? Did you tell her off?’ Kathleen had hoped that Steve was nice to her. Her anguish for every harsh word either of them had ever said to Alice, however mild, was still unbearable now, decades later.

  His face had gone strange, twisted, tight. He wasn’t Steve.

  ‘I was never cross with her.’

  ‘On the last day, she promised me to behave.’ She could only repeat: ‘They played hide and seek by the White House. Chief Inspector Hall told us that Eleanor said…’

  ‘Like I said, let them get on with it.’

  That was when Kathleen had learnt that Alice had been closer to Steve than she was to her. For the first time since Alice was born, Kathleen had minded about the strong unspoken love they shared. Only in life is the heart a bottomless pit. Alice’s love was now finite and Kathleen wanted more than half her share of it.

  With the doctor dead, Kathleen assumed she would get no more tapes. So she had lost another chance of finding Alice. He had delivered them to her every Saturday on his way to Lewes when he would also collect last week’s batch. She had the tapes ready by the door in a plastic bag. He never came in and they always went through the same routine:

  ‘Here’s another week’s worth. You keeping well?’

  ‘Can’t complain. I’ve put these back in date order and rewound them. How are you?’

  ‘Tired and I do complain, but no one listens!’

  ‘You must treat yourself properly.’ Kathleen didn’t like to delay him, he was still a busy man. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you next week then.’ She never liked to presume.

  ‘Same time same place!’

  Doctor Ramsay never asked if she had found anything on the tapes. He was too sensitive. He trusted her to tell him. Whatever she said he would believe her.

  She knew this for a fact.

  The tapes recorded all the comings and goings at the White House. Initially Kathleen had ignored anything that was outside the remit of her search. She was poised, intent, because this might be the week when Alice would materialise: a sneaking image skipping past the pool, dodging out of sight of the windows, cutting across the garden on her way back home.

  But Kathleen had observed that the Ramsays had a lot of visitors. She could not help becoming familiar with the man who came to see Isabel for several months on Wednesday afternoons when Kathleen knew the doctor was in London. But she didn’t notice the day he stopped appearing on the film. Kathleen tried to forget most of what she saw because she respected the Ramsays’ privacy; she was looking for Alice, everything else that went on was irrelevant. Yet despite herself, Kathleen got to know all the routines of the house. The video counter recorded the times of arrival of those who delivered: groceries, chemicals for the pool, furniture and of course the post. In the early tapes Kathleen would see the figure of Steve going up and returning down the drive, the film making him look like a character in the Woodentops. Then Kathleen would have to wind back and look more closely. This was a Steve she had never known, after he left the house in the mornings. In the past she hadn’t needed to know this other Steve for she had her own one. But as she watched the blurred black and white figure jerk across the screen over and over again, she felt miserable in a new way to the constant ache of Alice. This out-of-focus monochrome image was all she had. When Steve died the figure changed. First there was a relief postman, an elderly man, who would pause on the path to smell the lavender and here and there to dead head a flower, and then the permanent replacement – a woman young enough to be Kathleen’s daughter, who didn’t look in the least like Alice.

  Kathleen had begun by taking notes, partly to help her concentration, but as her Parkinson’s got worse, her writing became harder to read, and it was harder to write. So she gave up and kept no notes on her thoughts about the woman who she saw lingering behind the Judge’s shed every Friday morning when Doctor Ramsay was out and which, Kathleen also knew, was the gardener’s day off. She didn’t mention her for a long time because the woman always had her back to the camera and, besides, the film quality was very poor. Kathleen didn’t want to risk her relationship with Doctor Ramsay by bothering him with stupid fancies until she was absolutely sure.

  Last Saturday Doctor Ramsay hadn’t appeared. Kathleen waited in, confident that he would come. He was so reliable. She hadn’t liked to ring, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. The tapes were a big favour. Perhaps after what she had told him he had decided to stop letting her see them. Perhaps he had decided to use the same tape, erasing the previous week’s worth. Kathleen had tried not to panic. She relied on the tapes.

  Kathleen had not believed Iris when she told her, and she had wanted to get out of the shop. She wished she had not gone there, perhaps if she had stayed at home, she could have prevented his death. But she had gone for precisely that reason, worried as the time went on and Doctor Ramsay did not come. If there was anything to know, she had known that Iris would know it. As she struggled back and pushed open the front door, which these days she used all the time, she had caught her foot on the bag of videos still by the hat stand in the hall. Now Kathleen would have to find a way of returning them that wasn’t rude.

  Doctor Ramsay’s death made Kathleen think again about Alice. If he could die, with his big smile and his sparkly eyes, perhaps Alice could die too. She wouldn’t believe village rumours that the doctor had killed himself. He was a doctor; he gave life. She didn’t go out all of the Sunday. But on the Monday morning she remembered what he had said about the flame of hope and when she felt well enough she ventured next door to the stores and bought a sympathy card for Isabel Ramsay. She had planned to send roses too, until Iris informed her they had specifically said no flowers.

  Since Alice vanished Kathleen didn’t go to funerals, but she decided she would make an exception for Doctor Ramsay, as she had for Steve. She would buy herself a new outfit especially. So this was why on the Monday afternoon following Mark Ramsay’s death, Kathleen was in Marks and Spencer.

  That night Kathleen told Alice what she was doing, certain she would approve. Alice had liked Doctor Ramsay. Kathleen would always be grateful to him, because busy as he was, in those last few days that Alice spent with his family, Doctor Ramsay had given up some of his precious time to her.

  Eighteen

  Alice leaned her forehead against the front door and counted down from ten. Somewhere, perhaps on a quiz programme, she had heard that the Russians considered it good luck to sit for a moment on their travelling bags before embarking on a journey, and contemplate the expedition ahead. Today she needed all the luck she could get.

  …four, three, two. One.

  The door made no sound as she opened it. Once on the landing she used the key to close it. She was taking no chances.

  She had planned her journey, calculating travelling time, including delays and unforeseen events. Two weeks ago, when she had decided to go to the funeral, Alice had lain awake mentally mapping out the churchyard, working out where
she would stand during the burial. She couldn’t risk going into the church. She must be vigilant and not make assumptions about people’s focus of attention being on the coffin. There would be interest in a stranger.

  She was not a stranger.

  She would make sure to blend in, and meet any glance without looking away, as that attracted more suspicion. She would stay by the bank of nettles under the oak tree where the graveyard dipped away towards the downs. If necessary she could nip over the wall there. When it was all over, she would hurry away and come home. She had been taken aback to see the square-headed detective, grizzled with age and frustration, on the evening news. Of course, very quickly the media had made the connection with Doctor Ramsay and June 1968. Richard Hall ought to have been dead, but these men never let unsolved cases go. The police saw funerals as an opportunity, and from his interview the other night she knew he was still looking for Alice. She would have to be extremely careful.

  She had been shocked to see the photographs of the two girls in the papers. She had not followed the story from an adult’s perspective before and it jolted her to see how many people were involved in the search. It had been the biggest manhunt on record. A gruesome record that Alice was sure would be broken one day.

  She had felt winded when she read the Punch and Judy roll-call of participants: the Hanging Judge, the Kind Doctor turned Dead Professor, the Jackie Onassis look-alike, the Reckless Tomboy and the Innocent Schoolgirl who liked playing with dolls and might have been a ballet dancer if one day she hadn’t vanished off the face of the earth. Her eyes swam with tears as Alice read of the loving Dad who had died of grief. And last of all: long shot footage of Kathleen Howland combing the beach with a metal detector in the eighties, and more recently trawling through a black and white CCTV tape, or patrolling the Churchill Square shopping centre in Brighton while daily eroded by Parkinson’s Disease. Alice had folded up the paper unable to read more. The papers made the story seem real.

  The press had got a perfect summer story.

  Charbury had not changed. On the BBC news the reporter had broadcast from beside the red telephone box where Eleanor had called Gina, pretending to be a boy that Gina fancied, with the deep and panting voice she used for singing ‘I was born under a wandering star.’ She had sounded stupid, rasping into the phone, that he was desperately in love with Gina and had to see her at once. How could she have thought Gina would be taken in?

  I will kill you! Gina had promised in a matter of fact voice when they got home. She had been taken in. She told Alice and Eleanor that the boy’s mother had just died of cancer, which ruined the joke. Then the report had cut from the Ram Inn, bathed in sunshine, to pan out over undulating countryside – a natural home to Shredded Wheat or butter adverts – where cows pranced in unison upon green, green fields and people laughed in ceaseless mirth and slipped farm-fresh strawberries between white, white teeth.

  Paradise. Lost.

  Alice tried to tackle the ironing as the voices went on about what a lovely man Doctor Ramsay was.

  How did they know?

  Later she had cut out the articles about Professor Ramsay from the papers and spread them out on the living room table.

  Alice had thought all the games Eleanor wanted to play were silly. She didn’t approve of pretending.

  Just before Chris was due home, Alice gathered up the cuttings and shoved them under her pillow in an old envelope. She had become practised at flourishing sewing materials or watercolour sketches as alibi activities to avoid suspicion of her secret self. She couldn’t afford to arouse the attention of her ever-curious daughter. Alice had already pushed the bounds of normality by asking Chris to get three different newspapers for several days in a row. There hadn’t been that much coverage; the Ramsays were no longer important. Out of habit she still peered out through the lace, but he wasn’t there crouching behind a wheelie bin or sitting in the snug at the World Turned Upside Down. As she leaned against the front door, preparing after so long to leave the flat, she reflected that now she need never look to see if he was there. Now he would never come again.

  Finally in The Independent she had found what she was looking for:

  Ramsay, Mark Henry. Died at his home 6th June 1999, missed by Isabel, Gina, Lucian and Eleanor. Funeral 11.30am, Monday 28th June St Andrew’s Church, Charbury, East Sussex. No Flowers. All donations to the Parkinson’s Disease Society.

  The date of the funeral rang a bell. Alice had simply written the number: ‘11’ in her diary. She did not need the address. The service was well timed; she could be home by the afternoon. It was just possible that Chris would return early; now that she had finished her exams she came and went as she pleased. That was a risk Alice had to take.

  The funeral would be a huge risk, but now Alice was used to pretending, so wedded to her fabrications she mistook them for reality. Now a real event had interrupted her complex weavings.

  As Alice reached the ground floor and trod lightly past the door of the last flat, a latch clicked. In a second the door would open.

  It was over.

  She prepared herself for the neighbour’s amazement that the recluse-lady from upstairs was out and about, for the supposition that she had escaped. Call her daughter, call an ambulance. Alice had time to run, but she couldn’t move. Then she realised the door hadn’t opened. Instead, someone had double locked it from the inside. Footsteps receded.

  As she was going to step out into the quadrangle, Alice saw Jane arriving for work. She couldn’t believe her stupidity: how had she not considered Jane?

  One morning last November Alice had been gazing listlessly out of the window when her attention was caught by a woman striding towards the estate office. The woman was smartly dressed, in a dusky blue suit, and carried a slim brown leather briefcase. She looked too well heeled to be one of the housing association’s tenants and Alice watched keenly as she put her case on the ground while she jangled through a large bunch of keys to open the door.

  Suddenly and quite inexplicably the woman looked up at Alice’s window. Alice was astounded and jumped back from the glass bashing her hip against the dining table. She had been seen through the curtain.

  The next morning Alice had waited for the woman to arrive. Once again, with her brandished keys catching the winter sunlight, the woman – Alice had realised she was the new estate manager – glanced at Alice’s window and this time she smiled and made a slight movement with her hand that could have been a wave.

  By the end of the week, against her better judgement, Alice was waving back and even dreading the end of the working day, once her favourite time, when the manager would go home leaving the office dark and empty.

  When a Christmas card was put through her door, Alice had found out the woman’s name was Jane. Alice thought the name suited her. Nevertheless the card disturbed her. It was too informal, presuming too much. Alice didn’t want to place Jane in the midst of life and she couldn’t afford to be placed there herself. She had stared at the card, trying to guess what Jane’s second name might be. There must have been a letter of introduction when she took over from the dowdy man with dandruff shoulders and plastic shoes who had always behaved with Alice as if he doubted her. Alice had probably thrown the letter away unopened. She avoided the post. This propelled her into the admission that she knew nothing about Jane. Everything she knew she had made up. Alice didn’t want to think of Jane having a life beyond the archway; beyond her control.

  She had chucked the card in the bin.

  Halfway through the morning Alice had found a reason to retrieve it. Just as she was about to toss her used tea bag away, she pretended to spot the card as if thrown there by someone else, propped against a crushed milk carton. She lifted it out and wiped it down with the dishcloth. Then she read the message properly:

  ‘Have a lovely Christmas with your daughter. Perhaps in the New Year we could meet for coffee in the office. I could come and fetch you, if you liked. Best wishes Jane.’


  Alice analysed the words. She appreciated the fact that Jane hadn’t said ‘my office’ which would have put her off. She must know about the agoraphobia, but she was tactful. This disturbed Alice who tried so hard to be private. She decided not to reply. She would not go for coffee. There was always the chance that he had got to Jane. It made perfect sense as a first step. He would guess how to get to her.

  One January morning Jane didn’t turn up. After she had been absent four days, and just as Alice was weighing up the consequences of calling the head office of the housing association with a query about her rent, a postcard arrived from an island in Greece.

  ‘Taken the flu bug with me! But being ill in Athens beats being ill in Bermondsey! See you soon, all best Jane.’

  Alice had tucked the card into the frame of her pin board under the brochure for a new Chinese takeaway.

  A week later on the morning when Alice had guessed that Jane would return to work her anticipation had reached a ringing pitch of visceral anxiety.

  Chris had mixed feelings of relief and dismay when Alice wasn’t at the window to wave her off, but stayed at her dressing table, laboriously applying make-up as if she did so every morning. As she saw her mother soften the blotches of blusher with upward flicks of face powder Chris had hung about seriously considering staying off school to look after her until Alice got annoyed and shooed her out.

  Alice was at the window long before nine.

  When Jane didn’t appear, Alice began to worry that she had been wrong about the date. It was twenty past nine and the office remained shut with the blinds down. Alice grew angry, and abandoning caution she went away to find the number of head office. This meant she nearly missed her. She was carrying her briefcase under her arm, already getting her keys out of her coat pocket by the time Alice returned to the window with the telephone directory under her arm. Jane had a suntan. Alice dropped the book and in a burst of excitement was about to pull back the lace curtains and wave to her. She had unlocked the window in advance because today she had planned to pluck up the courage to lean out and suggest she came down to the office and accept Jane’s offer of coffee. She couldn’t let him rule her life. But as Alice took hold of the lace she had heard a distant tune: a crude snatch of Mozart playing on a child’s toy. She let the curtain drop and getting well back out of sight checked the quadrangle. There was no one else there. Then Jane fished into her bag and pulled out a mobile phone. Alice wasn’t used to mobiles. She never had need of one. She had bought Chris one for security reasons, but had been annoyed when it became a way for people to bypass her when they communicated with her daughter. Few of Chris’s friends called on the home telephone any more. Because of this Alice viewed mobile phones with antagonism. Her body had turned to sand as she saw Jane laughing and smiling, her head cocked to one side, wedging the handset on her shoulder while she opened the office door. She had not looked up at the window for Alice. The door swung shut behind her with a bang.