Missing From Home

by Mary Burchell

  “O—oh—” Marilyn swallowed nervously, and looked less than grateful for the intervention of the nice Jerry Penrose.

  “At first I drew a blank. But then I found a car-hire firm where the office clerk was quite bright. He says one of their men drove a pretty blonde girl in a white coat to West cliff last night and—”

  “Whereabouts in Westcliff?” cried Clare, too absorbed to notice that her younger daughter jumped like a shot rabbit.

  “That’s just it. They can’t let us know until tomorrow. The driver had his day off today, and although the clerk tried to get him on the phone, his wife said he wouldn’t be back until very late. But when he does come he should be able to say exactly where he took her.”

  “Oh, my dear boy—” Clare’s voice quivered with grateful emotion—“you don’t know how grateful I am! It was a wonderful idea of yours. And so very, very kind of you to follow it up like that. My husband and I will go down first thing in the morning.—Where did you say?—Yes—yes, I have a pencil. Yes, I’m writing it down now. I do thank you so much. And I’ll let you know what happens. Bless you! I’ll sleep much better tonight for this.

  “Just imagine—” she replaced the receiver and turned to Marilyn eagerly—“he went down to Harwich, backed his hunch that she probably hired a car, and found the place where she did get a car—”

  “He made himself pretty busy on her affairs considering he’s a complete stranger, didn’t he?” exclaimed Marilyn ungraciously.

  “Mari! He’s given me my first moments of relief since she disappeared. How can you talk so? Except for the fact that the driver had his day off today, we could have had the address right away. As it is we must wait until the morning.—Oh, darling, why are you mopping your forehead in that queer way? Is it the reaction? I’m sorry I spoke sharply. I know—I feel pretty limp myself. The relief is almost as painful as the anxiety. But how kind of that boy—!”

  “It wasn’t just kindness. He’s dead keen on Pat. She said—” Marilyn caught her breath in a great gasp—“she said often enough that—that some goofy fellows just fall for her on sight.”

  “Well, this isn’t a goofy fellow,” replied Clare crisply. “He’s kind and intelligent and bothers about other people, which is more than many do nowadays. If he really leads us to Pat I’ll think him the nearest thing to a knight in shining armour that I’m ever likely to know. I must telephone Greg.”

  “He probably won’t be in,” said Marilyn discouragingly.

  “Why shouldn’t he be?” Clare looked surprised. “Well, you don’t suppose he went from here just to sit in a hotel bedroom all the evening, do you?” replied Marilyn rudely. “I expect he’s out at a theatre enjoying himself.”

  “Marilyn, if I didn’t know it was anxiety that was making you so rude and ungracious I’d be really angry! You mustn’t talk of your father like that. He’s just as worried about Pat as I am.”

  “Then he could have stayed here and kept us company,” retorted Marilyn, and she looked rather as though she were going to cry.

  “Dear—” Clare sought desperately for the right words to explain the wrong actions—“it isn’t so simple as that. You see—”

  “It’s perfectly simple!” cried Marilyn, all her worry and weariness and fright suddenly boiling up into furious anger. “The simple fact is that he doesn’t want to bother about any of us. He wants a nice, charming irresponsible life where everyone makes a fuss of him and flatters him and makes him feel good. That’s why he walked out on us all!”

  She stopped as abruptly as she had started and a complete, shocked silence filled the room like something tangible.

  “I’m sorry,” Marilyn muttered at last. “I shouldn’t have said that, but—”

  “I’m glad you did,” Clare said slowly. “Because it’s almost exactly what I said—often. Oh, much, much too often! It seemed to me then the exact and bitter truth. It gave me a sort of dreadful importance to be always the injured party. Only, if you cast yourself for the role of injured party, the sole way to preserve your significance and identity is to cherish the injuries. It’s the most utterly soul-destroying thing in any relationship, justified or unjustified. I know that now.”

  Marilyn stared fascinatedly at her mother.

  “But he—he was in the wrong, wasn’t he?” she said at last.

  “Yes. And so was I.” Clare drew a long sigh. “It’s never all on one side, Mari. I suppose I knew that, in a way. I wasn’t so stupid as not to know at least that. But what you know and what governs your behaviour when you’re bitter and angry are two quite different things. I can’t tell you how strange it was to hear you using almost my own words. They sounded logical and justified in my own mouth. But when someone else says them they have a hollow ring.

  “I thought they sounded pretty good when I said them!” Marilyn grinned faintly at her mother.

  “There’s a bit of truth in them, darling. Don’t think I’m pretending anything else.” Clare smiled at her child. “But a bit of truth can sometimes be worse than a completely wrong statement. It’s not easy to see and accept one’s own mistakes. Still less is it easy to explain them to someone else—even one’s very dear daughter. Will you just take it from me that it wasn’t a simple issue, and that neither of us was blameless?”

  “All right.” Marilyn gave her mother a not very well aimed kiss which landed on the bridge of her nose. “Now you phone Dad and if he is in—I’ll apologise.”

  Clare gave a vexed little laugh. And she would have been more than human if she had not felt a certain sense of triumph and relief when Greg’s voice answered her as soon as the connection had been made.

  “Greg, it’s Clare!” The fact that she made a small face at her younger daughter across the room might have accounted for the fact that her voice sounded light and almost gay. “I think we have news of Pat at last.” And rapidly she explained the success of Jerry Penrose’s investigations.

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I have the phone number of the garage, and I’ll phone in the morning. And then, when I have Pat’s address, we could—I mean I will, if you like—”

  “We’re both going down there,” he told her firmly. “We’ll take the car. It will be the easiest way of bringing back the child and her luggage. Heaven knows what sort of problem we shall find when we get there, but we’ll worry about that when we have to. Thank God! It does sound like the real answer, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. Wait a moment, Greg! Mari is making signs.” Clare took the receiver away from her ear and said, “What is it, dear?”

  “The apology.” Marilyn held out her hand.

  “I thought you were making that to me!” Her mother looked amused.

  “No. To Dad.” Marilyn took the receiver and said, “Hello, Dad. I owe you an apology. I told Mother it was no use ringing you because you’d be out on the town, enjoying yourself.”

  There was a short—perhaps stunned—silence at the other end. Then her father’s voice said, “What made you think that, child?”

  “I thought you didn’t really care very much about what happened to any of us.” She ignored her mother’s gasp in the background. “Mother insisted I was wrong. It seems she knew best. I’m sorry.” Then she quietly replaced the receiver, said goodnight to her mother and went to her room.

  It was Marilyn who slept badly that night, then heavily towards morning, and who was roused from heavy veils of sleep by her mother’s voice calling, “There’s a letter! Mari, there’s a letter in Pat’s writing. Can I come in?”

  “Yes, of course!” Marilyn struggled into a sitting position and rubbed her eyes. “Read it, Mother! What does she say?”

  “It’s very short.” With unsteady hands Clare had ripped open the envelope and drawn out the single sheet. “She says—‘Dear Mother, This is just to tell you that I am perfectly safe and well. There is no need for you to worry about me. But I am staying away from home for the time being.—Love, Pat.’ ”

  “Is that all she says?” exc
laimed Marilyn, divided between admiration and irritation at her sister’s masterly brevity.

  “That’s—all.” Clare turned the sheet over and over in her hands, as though she must surely find a fresh clue or piece of information somewhere. “But it explains nothing—nothing! The child must be ill. It’s some sort of breakdown. She couldn’t write like that otherwise. Not a word of real explanation—not a hint. Just that she’s staying away from home for the time being. She can’t even have very much money left by now!”

  There were tears of disappointment and bewilderment in Clare’s eyes, and Marilyn with difficulty prevented herself from saying that she had at least replenished Pat’s funds with ten pounds. Instead, she said mechanically,

  “Don’t cry, Mother. At least we know she is safe.”

  “I’m not crying. And thanks to Jerry Penrose, she should be back with us in a matter of hours. But she must be ill, my poor little Pat. What other explanation is there? I’m going to phone that garage now and find if they have got her address.”

  “I’d leave it until after breakfast if I were you,” said Marilyn, with a surreptitious, anxious glance at the clock. “If that driver hasn’t reported for duty yet they won’t have the information, and you’ll only get more and more jumpy and frustrated if you have to keep on calling. Give it a little longer, Mother.”

  “You’re probably right.” Clare smiled faintly and ruffled her daughter’s hair. “You’re such a sensible child, Mari.”

  Feeling very guilty, Marilyn muttered something about getting up, and her mother went away.

  Greg arrived almost as they sat down to breakfast, and in the end it was he who telephoned to Harwich. The relieved expression which spread over his face almost immediately told Clare and Marilyn that he had the precious information, even before he rang off and exclaimed,

  “All right! I’ve got it. It’s a small private hotel. He couldn’t remember the number, but has given me the street. And he remembered the unusual bracelet she was wearing, because it caught in her handbag strap as she was paying the fare.”

  He thankfully accepted the cup of coffee Clare put in front of him, and then examined afresh the letter which she had shown him as soon as he arrived.

  “It’s desperately uninformative, isn’t it?” he frowned. “Not a hint of plans or reasons—or even difficulties.”

  “Mother thinks she must be ill,” contributed Marilyn.

  “And you, Mari? What do you think?” Her father’s glance was unexpectedly gentle. “Do you suppose that, like you, she might think I—we—people didn’t care about what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know.” Marilyn stared with some attention into her coffee cup. “When people keep away from each other it’s easy to get wrong impressions, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer that, and after a while Clare said, as gently as she might have to one of her children, “Drink your coffee, Greg. We’ll start as soon as you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready now.” He got up quickly.

  “Mari, here’s my shopping list.” Her mother handed over a slip of paper and some notes. “I don’t know what time we’ll get back, so would you see after that for me, dear?”

  “Yes, of course.” With difficulty Marilyn concealed her own impatience to be off, for she could hardly wait to join Pat at her new address and warn her that the chase was much hotter than they had ever expected. That, indeed, it might be wiser for her to move yet again, so that she should be more than one jump ahead.

  Cleverly, she managed to delay her parents for a quarter of an hour longer, which made her fairly certain that Pat would have got well away before they could drive the miles to Westcliff. For her own plans, it was perhaps just as well to do the shopping first. This, she argued, would give her sister time to arrive at the new address, where they would immediately review their plans and make any necessary fresh decisions.

  On her own at last, she whisked round the flat, cleared up the breakfast things, and hurried off to do the shopping. Like most shopping, it took a good deal longer than she had expected. But she got everything, took it back to the flat, distributed it in the proper places, so that there should be no impression that she had done anything in a wild hurry, and then at last she was free.

  “Pat’s bound to be there by now,” she assured herself, as she took the Underground to Notting Hill Gate. “By the time I’ve walked to the hotel—”

  Like the shopping, the walk took longer than she had expected, and after a while the thought struck her that she was not really going in the right direction.

  “Idiot! Why didn’t I look up the exact address before I started?” she asked herself angrily. “If I come to a post office, I’ll have a glance at a directory.”

  But before she found a post office she suddenly saw the garage which she and Pat had both remembered. Even from a distance she recognised the individual drive-in, flanked by large stone plant-pots, and she hurried on past the curve in the road which hid the other pavement from her view.

  And then she stopped dead, with the most dreadful jerk of dismay. For there was no Chipperfield Hotel—or any other kind of hotel—opposite the garage. There was just a block of very new-looking offices.

  For a panic-stricken moment or two, she tried to tell herself she had mistaken the garage. And then, certain though she was that this at least she had recognised, she went up to the man who was standing by the line of pumps.

  “I was looking for the Chipperfield Hotel,” she said, in a voice she could not keep entirely steady. “It—I thought it was opposite, on that corner.”

  “So it was, my dear, until something like a year ago,” the man assured her.

  “Did the—the people who ran it move elsewhere?” asked Marilyn desperately.

  “No. The old lady died. It was a family affair, I believe. And the place was sold up. Pretty penny they got for it too, I reckon,” the man added reflectively. “It’s a good site. Funny you should come and ask me about it. You’re the second young lady this morning to come enquiring for the Chipperfield.”

  “Oh, that would be my sister,” cried Marilyn, thankful for even this frail link with Pat. “When was that? Where did she go?”

  “We-ell, I’d say it was best part of an hour ago. And as for where she went I couldn’t tell you. She just got back into her taxi—for she’d some luggage with her—and drove away.”

  CHAPTER IV

  FOR several panic-stricken minutes after she left the garage, Marilyn walked about in an aimless sort of way. She tried to persuade herself that somehow, for some unknown reason, Pat might have lingered in the district. But soon the absurdity of such an idea forced itself upon her. Why should Pat do that? To the best of her belief Marilyn would not be visiting the hotel until Wednesday. She had no reason whatever to think that the urgency of events would bring her young sister there sooner.

  “Then what would be the most likely thing for her to do when she found the hotel no longer existed?” Marilyn asked herself distractedly. “What would I do in the circumstances?”

  Surely the most obvious and urgent thing would be to re-establish contact with her one ally in order to discuss—or even report—changed plans.

  “Would she dare to phone home?” thought Marilyn. “Risky—but what else could she do? She would have to risk Mother’s answering instead of me, of course. But then she could always just hang up quietly if Mother did reply. She may even have tried that already! In fact, I ought to be at home now, so as to get any message before the parents return.” And, galvanised into action by the sheer relief of having something specific to do, Marilyn made for the nearest Underground station as fast as she could. Once in the train, she fumed and counted and recounted the stations on the map opposite her and wondered if a taxi would have been quicker. But she had been rather lavish with taxis recently and the expense of this undertaking were already proving distinctly more than she and Pat had anticipated.

  Fortunately, it was only five minutes’ walk from her local station to the flat, an
d Marilyn did it in just under three. She was panting when she emerged from the lift, and she gave an extra gasp when she realised that a completely strange young man was standing outside her front door.

  “Good morning,” he said, before she could address him. “Are you by any chance Marilyn Collamore?”

  “Yes.” Marilyn regarded him suspiciously. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Jerry Penrose and—”

  “Oh, I know about you!” She immediately became wary. “You met my mother, didn’t you? And you did some self-appointed sleuthing about my sister.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he replied stiffly. “But if you would prefer me to take no further interest, just say so and I’ll go away without giving you your sister’s message.”

  “Message? You’ve got a message from Pat?” Marilyn’s whole attitude changed. “Oh, no—please don’t be offended. I’m sorry if I was curt, but we’re all a bit on edge, you know. Come in, anyway—” She began to fumble for her key, but the young man stopped her.

  “Don’t you know you should never invite strange men in when you’re on your own?” he said severely. “I might be any sort of crook, for all you know.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” retorted Marilyn lightly. “You’ve been reading too many thrillers.”

  “I begin to think I’m living one, from the ridiculous and mysterious way you and your sister are going on,” he replied crossly. “But anyway, I don’t want to come in. I promised Pat I would see you alone, and she seemed certain her parents would be out this morning—following some preposterous false clue, if I’m not mistaken.” He looked severely at Marilyn, who withstood the glance with admirable coolness.