‘Who else?’
‘Oh … Dysart’s handyman. I can’t … can’t remember his name. We found him … at the house. But it turned out he hadn’t witnessed the explosion, so Heather didn’t get much out of him.’
‘What was she trying to find out?’
‘I don’t know. Honest, Harry, I don’t. Nothing in particular … as far as I could tell.’
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘Afterwards? Nothing. Nothing … at all. Heather left Mallender Marine in October and … that was the last I saw of her.’
A silence fell and Harry stared ahead at the dark, blank windscreen. If Mossop was telling the truth, his visit to Tyler’s Hard with Heather had been an end in itself, not a herald of other discoveries. But Mossop, of course, did not know what the later photographs showed. Nor was he privy to Heather’s reasons for going to Tyler’s Hard and seeking out witnesses to her sister’s death.
‘Is that … any help, Harry?’
‘It’s not enough, Nige. I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you a favour.’
‘What f-f—’
‘Drive me to Tyler’s Hard. Like you did Heather. Take me wherever you took her. I want to meet Mrs Diamond … and the handyman. I want to see everything she saw that day.’
‘But … why?’
‘If I knew that, we wouldn’t need to go.’
‘Well, I can’t … actually. I can’t get away, you see. My m-mother—’
‘Tomorrow or Sunday. It’s your choice. But it has to be one or the other.’
Silence intruded once more. Harry did not need to remind Mossop of why he was obliged to grant him the favour he had asked. It was merely a question of waiting for him to accept the inevitable.
‘S-Sunday, then. I often … go bird-watching along the Fleet on Sundays. My mother wouldn’t think it odd … if I was out all day.’
‘Pick me up by the Jubilee Clock at half past nine.’
‘All right. I’ll … I’ll be there.’
‘Be sure you are. Remember: I’m counting on you.’ Which was ironical, Harry thought as he said it, since his assessment of Mossop’s character told him that to rely on such a man, in lesser matters as in greater, was likely to prove the starkest folly.
16
‘GOOD OF YOU to drive me, Ernie,’ Harry said, as the gears of Love’s van gave another mangled squeal.
‘You’d not have got there bloody else, would you?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ He winced as they sped round a bend, suspension and wheel-arch grating, and wondered again if the taxi fare would not have been a sound investment.
Ernie’s occupation, aside from betting, was that of a jobbing plumber, but he had freely confessed to Harry that it had ‘gone by the bloody board’ since Beryl’s death, hence the illegibility of his name on the side of the van, the lamentable state of the vehicle’s mechanics and the unserviceable appearance of the ballcocks and tap-fittings clanking around behind Harry’s seat.
‘We’re coming into the village now,’ said Harry, trying not to sound as relieved as he felt at sight of the Portesham sign. Ernie had volunteered to drive him there midway through his seventh Mackeson in the Globe the night before and, like the hard-nosed gambler he was, had insisted on honouring his pledge.
They turned off the Bridport road with a sickening tyre-screeching lurch and plunged down along the narrow main street of the village. ‘Been here before, have you?’ Ernie calmly enquired, oblivious to the speed he was maintaining.
‘Once, yes.’ It had been a dark winter’s night, as Harry recalled, within a year of his joining Mallender Marine. Charlie Mallender had invited some of the staff to a house-warming at Sabre Rise, his newly completed country residence near Portesham. Warner from Personnel had given Harry a lift. He had drunk too much and told Mrs Mallender a risqué joke by which she had not been amused, then given Lambert, the unctuous works manager, the benefit of his opinion. Even fifteen years later, the memory was embarrassing. Where had Heather been that night, he wondered: at boarding school – or a friend’s? Perhaps she had been upstairs in her bedroom, listening to the adults prattling below. Perhaps she had even … ‘Pull in here, Ernie, we can ask for directions at the pub.’
Sabre Rise, it transpired, was a short walk away along the lanes. In the circumstances, Harry was happy to leave Ernie imbibing at the bar of the Half Moon, hoist Heather’s rucksack onto his back and follow the landlady’s directions at his own solitary pace. The day was grey and still, the straggling outskirts of Portesham reserved and cautionary in the well-bred way of a monied English village. He climbed the steep winding road slowly, preparing and rehearsing the overtures he would make, the condolences he would offer, above all the questions he would ask.
Suddenly, without warning, a large dark blue estate car burst into view round the bend Harry was approaching, consuming, it seemed, the entire width of the lane. Instinctively, Harry flattened himself against the hedge. With a rush of air and a roar of sound, the car was past him and gone, spraying water from a puddle across his legs and leaving only a glimpse of the driver’s stonily indifferent face to remember. But a glimpse, Harry realized as he recovered his breath and mopped his trousers, was enough. The thornproof jacket, the tweed hat, the fat-bowled pipe, the set and veinous expression of a self-made man: they belonged to Charlie Mallender. He had not noticed Harry, which was only to be expected, since pedestrians would be one to his mind with all the lower orders, below decks, beyond consideration and beneath contempt. The golf-bag lodged in the rear of his car suggested a lengthy absence from home and that, Harry thought, augured well, for an anxious mother was always likelier to be reasonable than an outraged father.
Five minutes later, he reached the entrance to Sabre Rise. The boundary wall was of raw unpointed stone, the gate of stout, heavily varnished wood. Beyond lay broad immaculate lawns, a curving coarse-gravelled drive and the house itself, red-bricked, low-roofed and redolent of unseasoned wealth. The windows were too large, the surroundings too bare, the architecture too crudely expensive for a quiet fold of the Dorset countryside. Heather would have hated living there, he felt certain. Nothing in her gentle undemonstrative nature could have found a mirror in this bruising statement of her family’s prosperity.
Harry opened the gate and started up the drive, listening to his feet crunching loudly on the gravel. At one of the ground-floor windows a dalmatian appeared and began to bark. A net curtain in one of the first floor rooms was twitched back by an unseen hand. He reached the door and pressed the chiming bell.
A young woman answered. Her jeans, apron and Dorset accent suggested hired help. Before Harry could explain himself, a figure came into view down the open stairs. Thin, sour-faced and trembling faintly like a leaf in a breeze, she nevertheless possessed some high-cheeked memento of her daughter’s features and stared at Harry with instant ice-cold recognition. ‘All right, Jean,’ she said in a shallow, quivering voice. ‘I’ll deal with this.’
Jean obediently vanished. The dalmatian materialized silently in a doorway. Harry removed the rucksack and deposited it on the mat. And Marjorie Mallender walked slowly towards him.
‘What do you want here, Mr Barnett? It is Mr Barnett, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. ‘ Harry tried to smile, but the expression died on his face as she glared frigidly back. ‘I … I thought I ought to return Heather’s things. Clothes, jewellery, personal effects: you know the kind of …’
‘They’re in the rucksack?’
‘Er, yes.’
‘Then you may leave it there.’ She said no more, but Harry felt the full force of her unspoken wish that he should go. His preference, in different circumstances, would have been to do just that, but he knew he could not. ‘If you want my thanks, then you have them, Mr Barnett. Now, is that all?’
‘No. That is …’ Silence leapt between them like a physical entity. Why was this woman so incurious? Harry wondered. For all the lies her son might have told her about him, he was still the last man to have see
n her missing daughter and she was still the distracted mother eager for news. Yet she seemed to wish neither to accuse him nor to question him. ‘I thought … you might want to talk.’
‘About what?’
‘About Heather.’
She flinched at the sound of her daughter’s name, then instantly composed herself. ‘Why have you come here, Mr Barnett?’
‘I’ve just told you.’
She stepped forward and clasped the door as if to close it in his face, saying as she did so: ‘Please don’t call again.’
‘I’m looking for Heather,’ he shouted in response. She froze in mid-movement and, seeing that his words had won him a temporary reprieve, he went on: ‘Whatever Roy might think, Mrs Mallender, I didn’t murder Heather, or kidnap her, or even frighten her. I’m just the somebody who happened to be there when she vanished. I’m just the friend who’s trying his damnedest to find her.’
‘To find her?’
‘I’m convinced she’s still alive. I’m determined to prove it the only way I can: by following every trail that might lead me to her.’
‘The police believe she’s dead.’
‘But do you?’
‘Everybody thinks …’ Her voice died away but, in her eyes, a fragile hope was born. ‘Do you really mean what you’re saying, Mr Barnett?’
‘Yes.’
She stared at him for another moment of scrutiny, then said, ‘Come in’, and pushed the door back to admit him.
He followed her into a large picture-windowed lounge in which the furnishings and decorations seemed, for all their lavishness, not quite to fill the available space. Logs were blazing in the wide copper-cowled fireplace, yet a chill no thermometer could register robbed the thick carpet of warmth and the plush settees of comfort. The dalmatian kept an apprehensive vigil by the door whilst its mistress crossed to a side table where drinks stood on a tray. She poured herself a large gin and a miniscule tonic, neglected to offer Harry the same, then turned to face him.
‘We had no idea you were the friend she’d made in Rhodes,’ she said, with no more than a hint of hostility in her voice.
‘But you knew she had made a friend?’
‘Yes. She spoke of it in postcards.’
‘Perhaps she thought you’d worry if you knew it was me.’
‘Perhaps. Alan really should have warned us you were his caretaker.’
‘I’m perfectly harmless, Mrs Mallender. Surely you can see that for yourself?’
‘But my husband did sack you.’
‘That was ten years ago. Do you seriously think I still bear a grudge because of it, or would take it out on Heather if I did?’
‘Roy tells me there was trouble before then: complaints from some of the female staff.’
So Roy had added invention to misrepresentation. Harry should not have been surprised, but he was. It explained why Marjorie Mallender had been reluctant to speak to him, let alone admit him to her home, yet it did not explain why she had relented, nor why there was such a doubtful tone in her voice as she related what her son had told her. Sensing that to ignore Roy’s allegations would count for more with his mother than any number of denials, Harry offered none. Instead he adhered to a line of reason. ‘It seems to me, Mrs Mallender, that there are three possible explanations for Heather’s disappearance. One is, forgive me for saying so, that she was murdered and her body concealed where no search could find it.’
‘That is what my husband and son believe.’
‘But not what you believe?’
She countered with an uncommunicative stare.
‘Another possibility is that she was kidnapped and is being held somewhere against her will. It did occur to me …’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s been no ransom demand, as far as I know, but it’s not unheard of for the families of kidnap victims to keep contact with the kidnappers a secret, so as not to endanger—’
‘There has been no contact, Mr Barnett. You have my solemn word on that.’
‘Then only one possibility remains: that she vanished of her own accord; that she ran away rather than face—’
‘Rather than face what?’ Marjorie Mallender was breathing heavily now, her cheeks flushed with something more than gin. Either she had detected an implication in Harry’s words that he had not intended or those words had been nearer the truth than he had supposed.
‘I don’t know. She was due to come home in a few days. She seemed happy on Rhodes and reluctant to leave. But I didn’t think that was anything more than end-of-holiday blues. Then again, I’d only known her for a few weeks. She’s your daughter. You’re better placed than me to say if … if there was anything she might have wanted to run away from.’
Marjorie Mallender moved to the settee and sat down. She took a cigarette from a gold box on the coffee-table, lit it with an oversized onyx lighter, then gazed about for a moment at her expensively unsympathetic surroundings. For the next minute or so, she seemed to forget Harry’s presence, brooding on whatever memories or portents his words had brought to her mind. Then, just as he was beginning to wonder what he should do next, she looked up at him and said: ‘You know about her breakdown?’
‘Yes. She told me.’
‘She kept apologizing about it, Mr Barnett. For the embarrassment it caused us, you understand. Quite absurd, of course: one should not need to apologize to one’s own parents for something like that. But she thought she did, partly because she felt this ridiculous pressure on her after Clare’s death. Not grief: that’s to be expected. But responsibility for being left behind when Clare had been taken from us. Completely unjustified of course, but the more difficult to rid her of for that very reason. After her breakdown, when she had to give up teaching, she became dependent on us, at least for a while, and that only made matters worse in one sense. At all events, I’m sure it contributed to the relapse she suffered in October.’
‘Relapse?’
‘Oh yes. It’s why she left Mallender Marine. Working there at all was a silly idea in my opinion. What she needed was a complete break from the family, which is why I was so pleased when she accepted Alan’s invitation to visit Rhodes.’
Cautiously, Harry lowered himself into the armchair opposite her. ‘Do you think it possible, then, that she was desperate to avoid returning … to her family?’
This time there was no flare of injured pride. ‘No, I don’t. I considered Heather needed a rest from us, but she would never have agreed with me. Always there was that desperate eagerness to please, you see, that longing to prove she wasn’t a disappointment to us. It’s inconceivable she should have run away and left us to believe the worst.’ Marjorie Mallender glanced at a framed photograph standing in front of her on the coffee table. Harry could see her eyes drift out of focus as its subject carried her thoughts away once more. She reached forward, picked it up and gazed intently at it for several moments, shaking her head slowly as she did so. Then, catching Harry’s enquiring look, she turned it towards him. ‘This was taken on Clare’s twenty-first birthday: the twenty-fourth of August, 1980. I had two beautiful daughters then. Now …’ A sigh took the place of her dismal conclusion.
More from politeness than anything else, Harry leaned forward to examine the photograph. It was the standard back garden family snapshot: Marjorie Mallender flanked by her daughters, Heather instantly recognizable, Clare scarcely less so as a sophisticated, immaculately groomed version of her sister. By Heather’s left shoulder stood brother Roy. At the opposite end of the group, his arm round Clare’s waist, was a relative or friend Harry did not know, or rather … Suddenly, recognition dawned. It scarcely seemed credible, yet there was the photographic evidence to tell him it was so.
‘Is something wrong, Mr Barnett?’
‘No. That is … who’s the fifth person in this picture?’
‘Oh, Clare’s boyfriend. Fiancé, I suppose I should say, because—’
‘Fiancé?’
‘Yes, though the engagement
was broken off within a year. I was always sorry that Clare didn’t marry Jonathan. He’d have made her an excellent husband. Such a charming boy.’
‘This is Jonathan Minter, isn’t it?’
‘Why yes. Have you heard of him, Mr Barnett? I believe he’s made quite a name for himself as a journalist since then. He and Clare met at Oxford, you know.’
Harry looked back at the photograph and confronted the prosaic grin Minter had prepared for the camera. There he was again, where he had no business being: Clare Mallender’s fiancé as well as Virginia Dysart’s lover.
The fawning yelps of the dalmatian and the beating of its wagging tail against the door were what first alerted Harry to the fact that they were no longer alone. When he looked up, it was to see Charlie Mallender standing in the room, his face twitching with anger.
‘Why Charles,’ said Marjorie, glancing round at him. ‘You’re back earlier than I expected.’
‘Passed him in the lane,’ Charlie said, pointing at Harry. ‘Couldn’t place his face, though, until I got to the golf club. Reckoned he must be coming here. Came back at once.’ It was obvious from his voice that he was trying to control himself in his wife’s presence. ‘Must ask you to step out here, Barnett. Straightaway.’
‘But Charles—’
‘Stay out of this, woman.’ The self-control had not lasted long: his tone now was harsh and peremptory. ‘Barnett!’
Judging that nothing was to be gained by contesting the point, Harry rose and moved towards the door. As he passed the end of the settee, Marjorie caught his eye and conveyed by the directness of her gaze and the faintest nod of her head, that she at least was prepared to believe he was acting in good faith.
As soon as Harry reached the hall, Charlie Mallender closed the lounge door behind them and rounded on him. ‘What the hell do you mean by coming here and upsetting my wife?’
‘She’s not upset.’
‘Well I am. Now get out.’ He moved abruptly to the front door and flung it open. ‘Well? What are you waiting for?’
‘Listen, Charlie—’
Into the Blue Page 14
