by Jason Foss
Flint was wary of any accusations that it was he who had led Lucy astray. Outside, someone started up a powerful petrol lawnmower.
‘It’s this New Age, Mum, I told you,’ Barbara said, ‘Lucy has found a new way of life.’
Mrs Gray sat down again, momentarily. ‘Well, I don’t understand it. Do you understand it, Doctor Flint?’
‘To an extent, yes. Have you ever felt the modern world was closing in on you? Too much noise, too many people, too many rules, wars, strikes, crime?’
‘Well yes, everyone thinks that. I don’t like his lawnmower.’ She indicated the direction of her neighbour’s garden.
‘Some people feel we’re like rats in a cage, more and more of us squabbling over less and less. They think we’ve lost something, spirituality, the meaning of life, call it what you like. Then they start looking for something, and some find it in a new religion or a new political viewpoint.’
‘You make it sound like the nineteen sixties,’ said Derek.
‘It is. Another generation is going through an analogous experience to what kids went through in the sixties.’
Mrs Gray was on her feet again, offering sausage rolls. ‘Well, I hope she keeps away from drugs. Do these people take drugs?’
‘Some do, some don’t, Mother,’ Barbara said with a hint of irritation, ‘but Lucy took care of her body. She had more sense.’
‘Have the police managed to uncover anything?’ Flint asked.
Barbara paused, a sausage roll perched on the edge of her lips. ‘No. Your reporter friend was round last week, asking about you. Mother wouldn’t speak to her.’
‘Well!’ Mrs Gray said. ‘The things she wrote! Witchcraft, I ask you, how silly. And this curator man, he’s twice her age.’
Flint avoided being drawn. ‘Anything about Scotland from the police?’
‘They asked at the museum where she sent the first postcard from,’ Barbara replied.
‘The Burrell Collection?’
‘Yes, that’s right – but they discovered nothing.’
‘I had a good look at that card, compared it with her latest essays,’ he said. ‘They look the same, but the writing appears more forced on the card. Lucy was a bit of a scribbler.’
‘I thought Lucy had very nice handwriting,’ her mother said. ‘Do you remember, Barbara? We sent her to that special class.’
‘Yes.’
‘That reporter had some horrid ideas about Lucy,’ Mrs Gray said. ‘She tried to say she thought Lucy had been murdered; but you know she’s still alive, don’t you, Doctor Flint?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he lied badly.
She smiled an unconvincing smile. ‘So do the police. So do we all.’
Barbara gave a cracked, stiff smile of agreement, but her eyes said no. Fruit cake followed, accompanied by polite diversionary conversation. Derek wanted to know what Flint planned to excavate that summer, so he was able to chatter inconsequentially about Burke’s Warren and his Roman villa. Mrs Gray fidgeted to her feet and began clearing the table as they talked. After her second foray, Barbara nudged her husband and suggested he help wash up. Taking only a few moments to guess her game, he stood and called an offer of help to his mother-in-law.
Barbara poured two last cups of tea and suggested that she and Flint take them into the lounge. Her heel gently closed the door once he was seated on the sofa.
‘Can I see that card, Barbara? The Salisbury one?’ Flint asked.
‘They’re both here.’ Barbara reached for her handbag. ‘Mother received one too.’
He took the cards, looked over them, then pulled out a wad of Lucy’s essays from his briefcase.
‘Could you give me a few minutes?’
Barbara sat in the wooden-framed easy chair beside the fireplace, and sipped at her tea. Flint allowed his tea to cool whilst he compared word with word, letter with letter. After five minutes, he gave a little laugh.
‘A rabid hyphenator!’
‘Pardon?’
He waved the cards. ‘Rabid hyphenator! Here: she uses week-end. There: look-out.’
‘So?’
‘I get them all the time. Roof-tile, hand-axe, post-hole, beam-slot. But Lucy wasn’t one of them. Look at this essay: ‘potsherd... posthole... roof tile’. This card wasn’t written by Lucy.’
Barbara had the look of an eight-year-old whose disbelief in Father Christmas had finally been confirmed. ‘I never liked the ‘g’s. They look too neat.’
‘This is Christmas card writing. Lucy’s last two essays are a mess, look. No dots on ‘i’, incomplete ‘a’, and as you say, her ‘g’ loops straight into the next letter.’
Barbara had lost all colour. ‘Now what?’
‘I’ll take them to the police, try to get them to move out of first gear. It’s obvious that someone is sending these just to confuse us. I bet I was meant to go all the way down to Salisbury, wasting time and petrol...’
‘Yes, I’m sorry this is taking so much of your time.’
‘Oh don’t worry about that – we lecturers just sit around most of the day.’
‘No, seriously, you must have a lot of research to do. And this must be costing you a lot of money, all these train fares, then driving down to Wiltshire...’
She was right, of course. His bank balance had already felt the pain.
‘I don’t want you to be out-of-pocket on this…’
‘No, I can’t... ‘
‘Yes you can, I know how little archaeologists earn these days.’
‘Well, I can’t take money from you, Barbara...’
‘I took out an insurance policy on Lucy’s behalf when I got my practice. It’s not much, but I wanted to present it to her when she finally decided to settle down. I thought, perhaps, if she got married, or when she wanted a house of her own. It’s only worth three thousand pounds or so, not much. Unless she’s found, she’ll never get to spend it.’
She paused, hating her next words. ‘If she is dead, someone gets twelve thousand pounds – me probably. I couldn’t spend it, I’d give it to the dogs’ home or something.’
He picked up his cold tea and stirred it thoughtfully.
‘All I want to say is there will be money available, whatever happens. Don’t let lack of money stop you finding Lucy. I want you to send me a bill, every month, everything it costs you, until you find her. You can tell me now how much you have already spent.’
He pursed his lips.
‘It will make me happy.’
‘If it makes you happy.’
Barbara’s offer came as a relief; it opened doors, it made his retention of Tyrone easier, it made him more mobile, but it didn’t solve the problem.
Barbara looked him in the eye. ‘You think Lucy is dead, don’t you?’
He exhaled heavily – it was time for some truth. ‘I don’t know. A few weeks back, when you said you didn’t know Lucy very well, I didn’t realise how little you knew about her or how little anyone knew about her. Over the past year or two, she seems to have been getting — how can I put it — increasingly eccentric. I thought she was just going through the usual fight to be different, but the more I find out about her, the less I’m sure. Starting sometime last autumn she has deliberately set out to become a non-person. Unless I can find a reason, we have to assume the worst.’
Barbara was hiding something. There was a polite ‘I hate to mention this but’ straining to get out.
‘My mind keeps changing, Barbara. At first I thought it was nothing, just another student being cranky. The postcards seemed fine; I had made up my mind that she had deliberately dropped out. When I found out there was something odd going on with Piers Plant, I began to worry. Nothing can explain his behaviour, nothing. No scenario short of lunacy makes a single man disappear on suspicion of having been involved with a younger girl. Then there is this...’ He waved the postcard. ‘Something complex and sinister is going on, and it’s not just two people eloping.’
‘Monster,’ muttered Barbara.
; He followed her eyes. Above the Adams-style fireplace was a photo frame. A younger Barbara standing in her school uniform, and by her side a pretty nine-year-old in bunches and bows. Flint felt sick, not part of the tragedy, but sensing it all the same.
‘We knew something was going on,’ she said. ‘We thought it was someone at college, a student. She never talked about him, so I assumed there was something she felt guilty about.’ Barbara looked embarrassed. ‘I thought he might be, well, foreign...’
Flint eased over the confession. ‘I understand.’
‘…or married, perhaps, or even one of her lecturers.’
He couldn’t help raising an eyebrow.
Barbara’s embarrassment deepened. ‘Yes, I even thought it might be the great Doctor Flint we were always hearing about. I wish it had been.’ The last was spoken with quiet whimsy.
‘When was all this?’
‘Last autumn, you know yourself that’s when Lucy started changing. She became stranger, more obsessive about certain ideas...’ Her words trailed away in a shake of her head.
Yes, Barbara was holding something back, and again she was staring at the pretty little girl. ‘She never could, not with him.’ Barbara clearly wanted to deny the idea.
‘Tell me, please tell me everything you know.’ He had to unblock that hidden piece of information.
She sniffed. ‘Why didn’t she just get married? She could have lived with him. They could have...’She stopped.
He waited. A light rain began to patter on the leaded window pane.
‘In this day and age, Jeff, it’s not impossible. I’m a doctor, I know, I don’t approve, but I know.’
Riddles and trauma, but the truth was in reach.
She drew breath. ‘I could have told you earlier, but there seemed no point. You must promise not to tell anyone, no one, not my mother – and especially not that reporter.’
‘Fine.’
Anguished and guilty, Barbara checked the door was still closed. ‘I’ve been asking my own questions. I broke a few rules, I even told a white lie, but I discovered something, and it will kill Mother if she finds out.’ Her confession almost choked her. ‘Lucy was pregnant.’
Flint was as shocked as Barbara was pained. ‘Are you sure?’
She gave a reluctant nod, then quietly began relating her first suspicions and ran on to the final proof. A subtle tapping was heard at the door and after a discreet interval, Derek poked his head around it. He came into the room bearing coffees, quickly followed by Mrs Gray who was fussing over sugar lumps and who took cream. Flint saw the despair in Barbara’s eyes, then turned back to playing the guest.
As the polite tea party dwindled to an embarrassed end, thunderclouds closed over the Darkewater Valley. The electric show was limited to distant flashes and rumours of thunderclaps, but the rain intensified to ease the drought and wash the sides of the dusty British Rail carriage that rocked Jeffrey Flint back to London.
He mulled over that image of Lucy as a schoolgirl, and thought back on extra titbits of information Barbara had leaked out. It had been during the autumn months that Lucy had changed. Concepts which came to mind were fertility, spring rites and Mother Goddesses. Barbara had recalled oblique conversations with Lucy concerning motherhood, when Lucy had rebuked her sister for prescribing the Pill to pollute women’s bodies. When Lucy had been missing for a month, Barbara had used the old-girl network and a subtle twist of medical ethics to make contact with the College Health Centre. Only a little subterfuge had been required and the truth was known.
‘Lucy the Earth-Mother,’ Flint jotted on his notepad. Even he was beginning to use hyphens. The idea of Piers Plant as the father revolted him and fought against logic, but Lucy and Plant had obviously been close, and the world had seen odder matches. Perhaps they could have married and raised a brood of quirky children.
Then he came back to the enigma. Plant was divorced, neither of them had a social station to maintain, or any great wealth at risk so why would a pregnancy provoke a crisis? Perhaps Lucy could be lodged in some cottage hospital somewhere, having her sins erased by modern convenience medicine, but abortion was the work of a few days at most. Lucy had almost enough time to come to full term, unless this was another one of her games.
Dark nights, trains and inextricable plots were the stuff of murky black-and-white movies. Flint ran through all the old films he’d seen, with Bogart or Orson Welles wallowing in tangled intrigue. In the nineteen twenties, pregnancy might have been the cause of a hurried back-street abortion, with all its risks and consequences. In the forties, it might be an exceptional cause of blackmail and murder. In the nineteen nineties, it was little more problem than a hernia, with a shorter hospital waiting list. Single mothers were commonplace, unmarried couples were de rigueur in some circles. To murder Lucy because of a child would require a psychopath.
*
The night was full of sound and movement. As Flint finally reached the warmth of his houseboat, Vikki Corbett wiped the steam from the inside of her windscreen. The past weeks had seen hard graft and no reward. Piers Plant had been as secretive as he was now elusive. Few of his supposed friends could shed light on his recent past. Few would even admit to more than a nodding acquaintance at local functions. Plant had steadily grown into a social leper, with a reputation for cranky behaviour. He hardly held the credentials to charm a young woman’s heart.
Mrs Plant’s house was just visible from where Vikki’s car was parked at the top of the narrow lane. Scandal within the quiet row of bungalows had created a network of whispered gossip, which Vikki had used persistent enquiry to tap. Mrs Plant was respected, but her senility was spoken of with gentle patronising sympathy and just one hint of a recent fetish for late-night strolls by the river was sufficient to launch Vikki on her vigil.
Radio Darke played almost below the threshold of hearing, just enough to keep the reporter awake, but not enough to arouse attention. Four nights alone had been boring, but Vikki cursed herself for missing Friday. Wrong, she cursed Vince and his crazy flatmate and that snobbish girl from the florist’s. Friday might have been the night.
Two streetlamps illuminated the lane, the second standing between Mrs Plant’s cottage and where Vikki was parked. The thunderstorm had passed, leaving only a parting drizzle in the air and a distant crackle on the car radio. Vikki jabbed a finger towards the ‘off’ button when a silver shimmer grew visible for just a moment through the drizzle. She watched the furtive shape glance around then vanish into the wet night. Immediately, she pulled up her own rain hood, then slipped out of the door, closing it quietly.
Mrs Plant had at least a hundred yards’ start, so Vikki broke into a splashing jog. She left the loom of the last streetlamp at the bottom of the lane, where a slimy footpath led for fifty yards towards the river. Clinging, dripping bushes wiped at both her arms as Vikki tried to keep her distance, yet not lose contact. Ahead, the sky brightened as she slipped down on to the towpath by the canalised section of the river.
Town lights reflected from the river enabled her to differentiate buildings from trees, sky from water. Trees which lined each bank still whispered with the impact of raindrops, passing these on to the river in heavy drips. Vikki watched for motion, but Mrs Plant could not be seen...
She could run left into town or right away from town. To the left lay a number of old warehouses connected with the defunct canal trade. To the right, an endless possibility of riverside boathouses, huts and an abandoned paper mill, so it made sense to choose right. Vikki walked cautiously for a hundred yards and lost the light. Then she paused and listened for sound that was not rain, or trees, or river, or distant traffic. Had she chosen badly? Vikki turned about, ran back to the end of the lane then indecision stopped her again.
She would go towards town – cautiously and miserably, for the rain had begun once more. For half a mile her tights absorbed the brown water splashing up from the towpath, until with mascara smeared down her cheeks she came to Castlereagh
Bridge. Cursing in the sodium glare, she looked back into the rainstorm. Somewhere back there, she had so nearly found an answer.
*
Mrs Plant had indeed turned left. She walked steadily along the waterfront, where only one vehicle and its owner sat waiting patiently. Rowan opened the door and spoke to the old woman in her assured, commanding voice. Once relieved of her carrier bag, Mrs Plant was turned around and told to go home.
Rowan had thought she had seen movement by the old lock-keeper’s hut, so she moved towards it with renewed confidence. Piers Plant pressed his back against the wall of the hut, saying nothing. Raindrops dripping from a tree beat time on the tin roof, which leaked water into the corner with a steady drip-drip. Rowan shook her coat and lay down the carrier bag.
‘Hello Oak.’
‘Rowan?’ His voice held a hint of panic.
‘I brought you some food,’ she said. ‘You were very easy to find.’
He seemed to be breathing heavily, although she couldn’t see him.
‘You’re running out of time, you know. The longer you hide, the more people suspect.’
‘I can’t go back,’ he stated.
‘You must.’
‘You can’t hide for ever.’
‘I can.’
‘Someone is going to find you, even if only by accident.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘impossible. Nobody knows, nobody can know.’
A madman is convinced of his own sanity, she thought. Oak was so dangerous now. ‘That reporter is asking everyone: your friends, your relations, even the places you do your shopping.’ This last remark was pointed directly at him.
Suddenly, Plant slipped from a voice of absolute conviction to one of the hunted animal. ‘What is happening? What are people saying? What is that snooping lecturer doing?’
‘I wish you would forget about damned Doctor Flint! He’s far too clever for himself – you can just forget him. If he finds a clue which says Lucy Gray is on the Moon, he will go to the Moon. The police are being dealt with, and the reporter is both young and stupid. All our enemies are running around in the dark. They know nothing; they know less than they think they do.’
