Wings over the Watcher

by Priscilla Masters

  It was quickly obvious she wasn’t going to cope with the usual thirty mile ride.

  It is hard to look ungainly on a bike. Cycling is a sport in which you can look good on a flat or downhill even when it’s your first time out. Provided you don’t wobble too much. And you can always either go-slow or push up a hill. But Beatrice somehow managed to do the impossible, look clumsy on her machine. She wobbled constantly, braked too hard, losing her balance and panicking then putting her foot down. She sweated her way up the first incline and slowed them right down. Yet Joanna and all the others continued to admire her indomitable spirit and good-humour. It didn’t seem to faze her that she was lagging far behind so they encouraged her every few minutes, dropping back to chat to her. It was obvious Beatrice had found the hills hard work and her legs were clearly not used to the exercise but she had gritted her teeth and persevered and to her credit had managed the ten miles, waving them off happily as they’d finished their ride.

  She’d joined them for a few more weeks, her form gradually improving, then as suddenly as she had started, she had stopped coming. Last Sunday they’d waited for ten extra, precious minutes, finally setting off without her in a downpour. Joanna had assumed that, like many others before her, Beatrice had found the attempt at fitness simply too tough.

  Now, four days later, Joanna was looking at her husband.

  Unexciting was the word that came into mind as she recalled fragments of conversation and conjecture.

  Pagan, one of her two cycling buddies, watching the bike and rump wobbling ahead. “Wonder what’s started this off.”

  Pat, married teacher, whose husband spent all of Sundays fishing, “New man.” Said with a twinkle.

  “Doctor’s orders,” had been Joanna’s explanation and the three had giggled like chummy schoolgirls and freewheeled down the hill, overtaking Beatrice’s squeaking brakes.

  “Need some oil,” they’d thrown back as they rushed past.

  Arthur Pennington adjusted his glasses.

  “Sit down, Mr Pennington,” she invited, feeling unaccountably sorry for the man. “I do remember your wife. Of course I do. Quite well, in fact. She’s getting quite good on her bike, isn’t she?”

  Pennington practically tossed his head as though this was of no interest to him so she didn’t pursue the subject. “What can I do for you?”

  His pale, shining forehead was corrugated from brow to receding hairline with anxiety. “It’s about her,” he said, “my wife, Beatrice. She’s gone.”

  Joanna felt a sudden quickening. So Pat had been right. Beatrice had had a lover and it had been that which had lain behind the fitness attempt.

  And now?

  Surely it was obvious. She had left to be with him.

  Something in her crowed for all middle-aged women who are married to unexciting men who take them for granted and break out. It was the clichéd stuff of modern fiction.

  But one look at her husband’s face was enough to stub that idea out. Arthur Pennington was suffering.

  She made a feeble attempt at mediating. “When you say, “gone”, do you mean she’s left you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what’s happened. I only know she’s apparently disappeared. She isn’t home. I expected her back from work last night around six and they said she hadn’t been in all day. She didn’t come home at all last night. I lay awake, right through the night, waiting for her, Inspector. So where is she? We hadn’t had a row or a fall out or anything. I just don’t understand.”

  In cases like this the usual story is that the woman has decided to leave her life – her husband – her children – her home – everything – either temporarily or permanently. And Joanna had secret knowledge from the mouth of Beatrice herself, which put her in a position of cognisance.

  “Actually,” she’d confided at the top of a very steep hill, her face as red as a beetroot with the effort of the climb, “I am married. I do have a husband. But I also have someone else.”

  Joanna had been simultaneously startled, excited and intrigued. Her first thought had been: You could not judge by appearances. “Really?” had been all she’d managed.

  “Yes.” Beatrice’s face had been solemn – and at the same time almost ethereal with this hidden love. “Oh yes,” she’d confessed. “Someone quite special.” And her face had reminded Joanna of old, religious paintings, which portrayed adoration.

  So this news from Arthur Pennington was hardly unexpected.

  Joanna came back to the present. Pennington was staring at her, his head to one side, chicken-like, waiting for her answers.

  And party to this secret knowledge Joanna was uncomfortable. Did Arthur Pennington know about the someone else? Did he have any suspicion that his wife had this secret life?

  She was aware that she must approach this nutty little problem with great delicacy so she sat right back in her chair and adopted a friendly, informal approach. “Let me ask you a few questions, Mr Pennington.”

  He sat very upright. “Go ahead,” he said with a tinge of bravado about him.

  Korpanski chose that moment to barge into the room, spied Pennington and apologised. Joanna seized the opportunity to ask the aggrieved husband whether he would like a tea or coffee, knowing that he could probably do with something a little stronger.

  Pennington elected for a tea, she for a coffee and Mike withdrew to act as tea-boy.

  While she resumed the questioning. “Has your wife packed any clothes?”

  “I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “Women have so many, don’t they?”

  So he didn’t know the contents of his wife’s wardrobe. What man did? Matthew? Mentally she shook her head. He no more or less than most men. Women’s wardrobes were a testimony to their complicated psyches. All those hidden parcels for projected transformations they would never achieve. “I’ve had it for ages, dear”, mistaken never-worn purchases and old favourites women could never bear to part with – the size 10s they would never again wear – retained simply to remind them of the waist they once had, the size they once were, the person they would never again be. The clothes they had been persuaded to buy against their better judgement by well-meaning friends or overbearing shop assistants. “You look lovely in fuchsia, madam.” When it was the last colour they should ever wear. There were the evening dresses they could not wear again because “everyone’s seen it before”. And lastly there were the fashions, which would “come around again”. The yachting trousers and jackets. The expensive suit bought for a wedding. And in Joanna’s case two dresses of significance. The fancy, floaty frock she had bought for Daniel’s christening when she had been his godmother and a red evening dress worn at the Legal ball on the last occasion when she had seen Matthew out for an evening with his wife.

  Then, like most women (and Joanna assumed that she and Beatrice shared this other characteristic of the female sex), right at the bottom of the wardrobe were all the shoes which were either the wrong colour, or had suited only one outfit – ever – or were far too uncomfortable and made you feel like Hans Christian Anderson’s mermaid – that you walked on razor blades or shards of glass. And maybe, right at the back, hidden even beneath the shoe-boxes, some women even concealed old love-letters or money – or gifts they never should have accepted. Burglars know this – that the back of women’s wardrobes is invariably worth their attention.

  But, looking at Arthur Pennington, Joanna guessed that all this was pure mystery.

  “Are any suitcases missing?”

  He thought for a minute, pondering this new question. Pennington did not hurry. Was incapable of sudden spurts of effort. “I don’t think so. I haven’t really looked in the loft. I just came straight down here. She’s never gone missing before. It’s completely out of character. Nothing like her at all. I’m worried, Inspector.” His pale eyes looked as helpless as a baby’s. “What if something’s happened to her?”

  She regarded him. Something has but nothing you would recognise or
understand.

  She was quick to reassure him. “Look – Mr Pennington. It’s really unlikely that she’s come to any harm. Hospitals are very quick to inform relatives if there’s been an accident. There wasn’t one in Leek yesterday anyway. It’s much more likely that she’s with a friend.”

  “I’ve checked her closest friends.”

  “I’ll need a list of them. What about your children?”

  “We’ve two. We’ve a son who works on the oil rigs and a daughter who works in London for an advertising company. I haven’t rung them. She won’t be there.”

  “You should still ring and check.”

  “If you think it’s necessary. But I tell you. She won’t be with either of them. Our daughter lives in a tiny one-roomed flat with her boyfriend. There’s physically no room there. And as for Graham – well – he’s somewhere in the North Sea.”

  “What about your wife’s passport? Is that missing?”

  He looked at her incredulously. “I don’t know. I haven’t checked that. Beatrice wouldn’t have gone abroad without telling me.”

  He just didn’t understand, did he? This was not the Beatrice he knew – or thought he knew. This was the other woman. The different woman. The one he probably never had known.

  Her sympathy was tinged with exasperation. “Look – Arthur – Mr Pennington. In most cases like this the wife turns up a bit later and no harm is done. I suggest you go home and check through the items I’ve mentioned. See what’s missing. I’m sure she’ll turn up somewhere.”

  Korpanski interrupted them with their drinks, taking a while to fuss over milk and sugar before sitting at his own desk in the far corner and silently witnessing the interview. Joanna was more than usually aware of him. She wished he wasn’t there.

  With the result that she was frowning as she continued with her questions. “Just for the record where does your wife work?”

  “Leek library.” Pennington was just beginning to run out of patience. “But as I said she didn’t turn up at all yesterday, Wednesday. It’s their busiest day – being market day and all that. They were very annoyed.”

  Joanna sensed that to Pennington the word annoyed meant something deeper. Anger, frustration, inconvenience.

  “She didn’t phone in sick?”

  “No – she didn’t. I don’t recall Beatrice ever being sick. It’s most odd,” he mused. “She set out for work as normal. She wasn’t unwell. Where did she go if she didn’t go to work? Why did she set out on her bike as usual if she had no intention of spending the day at the library? She deceived me.”

  Joanna nodded and Pennington failed to notice.

  But in every disappearance there is an exact point at which a person exits from one life to enter another. So – you pretend you are going to work, setting out as normal. You might even travel for a mile or two along that road. But at some point you veer to the right or left, depart from your normal route. And the farther you travel along this strange and unfamiliar road the farther you are away from your old life. Sometimes the void between the two becomes so wide, so vast, that it is a no-man’s-land you can never ever cross again.

  And the little Joanna knew about the missing woman seemed to underline a person who could take this route. There had been something very fervent about the way Beatrice had gritted her teeth and driven herself up the hills on her bike, pulse racing, sweating. Finding it physically tough – yet performing it without complaint or giving up. And at the top Joanna had seen more than simply the glow of exercise achieved. She had witnessed something else. The nearest she could get to it was a child presenting its mother with a school-made Mothers’ Day card or a home-baked cake offered for tea.

  Oh yes. There had been love lying behind Beatrice’s effort and it was not for the bespectacled man sitting on the other side of Joanna’s desk.

  In the corner of her eye she could see Korpanski’s chair turning into the room, knew his eyebrows were rising, that his dark eyes would be wide and innocent and that he would deny that he had been both listening and inventing a solution. But basically they both knew already that this was a “domestic”. Something between husband and wife. Nothing to do with the law. This was the story of a woman who simply wanted to escape the humdrum nature of her mundane life.

  It didn’t interest her. And glancing across at Korpanski’s face she knew it wouldn’t interest him either. But she must feign concern.

  “One last question,” she said. “What about money?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you have a joint bank account? Has any money been withdrawn?”

  “I don’t know. Yes – we do have a joint bank account but I haven’t looked in it.”

  “Then I suggest you get a statement. What about her car?”

  “She’s been cycling to work lately. Getting fit,” he said disparagingly.

  It answered just one of the tiny little questions which the mind will inevitably ask. How was it that Beatrice’s form had improved so dramatically during the few weeks since she had joined the cycling club? She had not admitted that she had been cycling into work every day. Joanna smiled. More evidence of feminine deceit.

  “Her car’s still in the garage,” Pennington said disconsolately.

  She stood up then, agitated with a silly vision of Beatrice Pennington being whisked off in an exotic sports car to a destination unknown, like the final scene of Grease. Into the sunset of fantasyland.

  The idiotic picture made her anxious to dismiss the husband so she shook his hand, suggested he do the “homework” she had set him and watched him shuffle out with a feeling of despair. He had a shock waiting for him. He was about to turn over his wife’s life and find something nasty crawling beneath the stones.

  She was torn, as a woman and as a policeman, something between sympathy and admiration.

  The woman won.

  “Go for it, Beatrice”, she muttered under her breath. “Go for it.”

  Chapter Four

  Korpanski watched her close the door behind the sad man. “Anything interesting?”

  “Nope. Just a woman who got bored with her husband and has legged it. Probably with some fancy man.” She leaned back in her chair and smiled, picturing Beatrice Pennington – happy at last – just as she had been when she’d reached the top of the hill under her own steam and surveyed the panorama beneath her feet. The vision gave her a feeling of warmth. At least someone was happy.

  Korpanski gave her a sharp look. “You’re looking like the cat that got the cream. Heard from Levin, have you?”

  “Nope.” She turned back to her computer screen and pretended to read off last month’s crime figures. Korpanski’s eyes were too penetrating sometimes. He read her when she didn’t want to be read. “No, I haven’t.”

  “He’s a…”

  “Mike. Please,” she appealed, “leave my private life alone.” It was hard enough fighting her own devils without Korpanski acting as St George, brandishing his chivalrous sword at her side.

  He was sitting on the corner of his desk, his leg swinging. “Sometimes it’s difficult,” he observed, slipping back into his chair and moodily staring at his own computer screen.

  She hated the silence between them and jerked her head in the direction of the door, knowing they should move away from personal things and return to safer ground. They were colleagues after all but it was a tightrope they constantly teetered along. “It’s simply a case of an errant wife,” she said – calmer now. “An errant wife who has, coincidentally been coming out cycling with the ladies of Leek for a few weeks. Even more of a coincidence is that during a bike ride a couple of weeks ago she confessed to having a secret lover.”

  “Ooh.” Korpanski was grinning. “I love a bit of scandal.”

  “She missed coming out with us on Sunday and, according to her husband, disappeared yesterday instead of going to work in the library. I wish all disappearances were as simple to resolve.”

  “What dangerous lives some people lead.”<
br />
  “Mmm.” She leaned back in her chair and eyed him up slyly. She never could resist teasing him. “Talking about excitement, did you get your little insurance claim sorted?”

  Without warning Korpanski’s face went puce and the muscles in his neck stood out like ropes. “That little episode,” he exploded, “is about to cost us a bloody fortune in lost No Claims and Excess. I could kill Fran for her carelessness. And typically she’s shifted the blame onto me just because the handbrake was a bit loose. And now the insurance company have started asking awkward questions. I told her always to leave the car in gear. Women,” he ended furiously.

  He paced the room for a moment, stopping in front of her desk.

  She braced herself for another onslaught but just as abruptly his face had softened with concern so she answered his question before he even asked it. “No, Mike,” she said. “I haven’t heard and I’m not ringing.”

  “I didn’t think you were so proud,” he said, “or so jealous.”

  The words stung like salt water sprayed across her face.

  “He’ll damn me one way or the other, blame me completely and probably disbelieve me. I’m dreading the inevitable fall out. If he’s met someone else then maybe it’s just as well. It’ll be easier – less complicated.”

  “You don’t mean it, Jo.”

  “Don’t I?” She gave a long sigh. “Don’t I? Ever since I first met Matthew he’s come with a rucksack full of complications. First of all a wife – Jane. Then a daughter, Eloise. And now this. Quite honestly I wouldn’t mind just for once a relationship without complications. Something nice and simple.”