‘I’m glad,’ I said with a mighty yawn, ‘that we’re getting this little holiday from our holiday.’
My answer from Alan was a snore.
I had to struggle with my conscience next morning. It was a lovely May day, the beginning of the long Bank Holiday weekend. The roads would be clogged with holidaymakers heading to the chilly seaside, where the children could dig in the sand, or the pebbles, and the adults could either wear winter coats and be comfortable, or proper beach clothing and turn blue. Here in Sherebury it looked like being a warm day, not too hot, with perhaps a shower later on. The garden was beautiful, thanks to the efforts of Bob Finch, our devoted if sometimes drunken gardener. Alan had got up early and fed the cats, and they were back on the bed, purring. I wanted nothing more than to stay there with them, dozing and sipping tea and being lazy.
And in London, a mother and her son waited in luxury and terror, while in or around Broadway, an extremely dangerous man walked free, and a woman lay captive . . . captive, or . . . I wouldn’t let myself consider the alternative.
I was out of the shower by the time Alan brought my tea.
‘Side roads, I think, love,’ was Alan’s only comment as we got into the car. There was no other decision to be made. ‘Less traffic, possibly.’
It used to amaze me how long it took to get anywhere in England. The whole country is only something like 800 miles from one end to the other. How could it take most of the day to drive a couple of hundred miles? That was before I understood the complexity of the roads, and the traffic.
America is laid out in a grid, more or less. We are a young country, whose aboriginal peoples travelled only on foot, and seldom more than a day’s walk from their tiny villages. When the white man came, they laid out towns according to the compass, and when they started building roads, they built long ones, from one town to the next. Later highways were built for the purpose of carrying people and freight long distances as quickly as possible. I had a friend, years ago, who lived in northern Indiana, and when she visited me and my English friends asked where she lived, she said, ‘Not far from Chicago,’ knowing they might have heard of that huge city. When pressed, she would admit that ‘not far’ meant about a hundred miles. She never quite understood why the English greeted that remark with hilarity. Subdued, of course, but definite.
In England, the roads are organic. They grew out of the needs of the people. Foot traffic first, of course, then beasts of burden with wheeled carts. Paths became tracks, tracks became roads, eventually roads were paved and, in very recent history, motorways were established from one big city to another. But given the density of the English population, the motorways are often hopelessly clogged, and side roads . . . well, the old doggerel ‘The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road’ too often seems apt. My favourites are the euphemistically named ‘narrow roads with passing places’. That little phrase means that the road consists of one narrow lane, and if you meet another vehicle, perhaps on a blind curve, one of you must react in time to avoid a head-on collision, and one must back up until there is a small layby to pull in to, so that the other may pass.
Then there are the roundabouts. Don’t get me started on roundabouts.
Alan does the driving. I’m great with a map; I navigate.
It took us most of the day to get to our holiday cottage. I looked at it with a jaundiced eye as Alan stopped the car in front of the house. The rain which had promised, in Sherebury, to be a gentle sprinkle, had been in this part of the country a downpour for the last hour. The drive was sodden and rutted; the house looked bleak and forlorn. I thought of our solid, beautiful Georgian house in Sherebury and suppressed a sigh as I got out and made a dash for the front door.
‘Are we out of our minds?’ I asked my loving husband as we sat and sipped bourbon. He had built a fire, and the cottage was beginning to get warm, but it smelled damp, and there was nothing much to eat except cheese and limp biscuits and canned soup. I would bestir myself soon and put together a scratch meal. We certainly had no desire to go out into the drenching rain.
‘Probably,’ said Alan. ‘We could be home in front of our own fire at this very moment. We could let the very efficient police deal with all the problems here.’
‘But we can’t, can we? I can’t, anyway. If that dreadful man found Sarah, Paul, and the girls, we’d never forgive ourselves for not trying to . . . Alan, what’s that noise?’
The back door was rattling. I’d thought at first it was the wind, but the wind died down for a moment, and the rattling continued. ‘Is someone trying to get into the house?’ Despite my best efforts at control, my voice rose almost to a squeak.
Alan had the sense to grab the poker before he went through the tiny kitchen to the back door. ‘Who’s there?’ he shouted, his voice an intimidating roar.
The rattling became frenzied, and was accompanied by a barrage of barks and whines. I started to laugh. ‘A dog?’
Alan opened the door cautiously, and a bedraggled black and white creature crept in, belly low to the ground, tail between its legs. It looked up at Alan and whined gently, then shook itself vigorously, spraying water all over Alan, the kitchen floor, and everything else within range.
‘Well, old chap, where did you come from? Love, get me some towels, would you? The poor thing is freezing.’
He led the dog into the front room and knelt in front of the fire, holding out his hand. The dog, still uncertain of its welcome, licked his hand and tried a tentative wag of his tail. I brought towels, and the two of us managed to remove quite a lot of water, along with a great deal of mud, from the shivering animal.
‘He – is it a he?’ Alan investigated tactfully and nodded. ‘He’s not a very prepossessing specimen, is he?’
‘Not at the moment.’ The dog’s fur was matted and still very muddy. He still shivered in hard spasms, but he had uttered no more barks or whines. ‘Let’s feed him, and bathe him, and then see what we have here.’
Alan’s voice had taken on a foolish, motherly quality. Alarm bells began ringing in my head. ‘We need to find his owners,’ I said firmly.
‘Of course. But we can make him clean and comfortable first. I refuse to share a small house with a dog this dirty.’
There was little to eat, even for us, and almost nothing that was suitable for a dog. But I found a dab of pâté in the fridge, and a can of beef and barley soup. He accepted both offerings with an alacrity that suggested he hadn’t eaten for some time, and then lapped up a soup bowl full of water.
‘All right, sir, it’s bath time.’
I cravenly retired back to the fire while distressing sounds issued from the bathroom.
When my beloved emerged, much of the mud appeared to have transferred itself to his person, but the dog, though horrified after his ordeal, and looking very small with all his fur clinging to his body, was much better-looking.
‘I’ll just go and change,’ said Alan.
‘What does the bathroom look like?’ I called after his retreating figure, but he pretended not to hear me.
The dog, meanwhile, sank down in front of the fire, burped gently, and went to sleep.
Alan also looked much more respectable when he came out of the bedroom. I poured him an extra tot of bourbon and gestured to the crackers and cheese I had set out. ‘That’s supper, I’m afraid. Buster here got the rest.’
‘The old boy was starved, Dorothy.’ That fond, foolish tone again. ‘I think he’s been living rough for a while. You can feel his ribs, sharp under the fur.’
I opened my mouth to say something, saw his face as he looked at the dog, and changed my mind. ‘What breed do you suppose he is?’ I asked mildly.
‘Mixed, certainly, but I should think mostly spaniel of some sort. When we get the brambles out of his fur it will be nicely feathered, and he certainly has a spaniel’s muzzle and ears. He’ll be quite handsome when he’s dry.’
Again I took breath, and again stopped myself. I was too tired to arg
ue. In the morning Alan would have come to his senses and we could discuss what we were to do with this animal.
In the middle of the night, I was awakened from a troubled sleep by the sensation of an earthquake. The bed rocked. I sat up, trying to banish the shreds of disagreeable dreams, and saw a pair of liquid eyes a foot from my face.
The dog cocked his head to one side and smiled at me. Then he turned around several times and burrowed contentedly into the nest he had made for himself, squarely in the middle of the bed.
I sighed loudly, turned over in the small space left to me, and went back to sleep.
The rain continued all night, and I slept late. Rain is such a pleasant background for sleeping. I woke, finally, to find myself alone in bed and, indeed, in the cottage.
I staggered to the kitchen and found the coffee already made, and cold, and a note on the counter. ‘Buster and I went to town for provisions. Back soon.’
Taking the dog with him in the car. This was a bad sign. We were going to have to have a serious talk when he got back.
I microwaved a cup of the coffee and lit a fire, and then sat and made plans. What could we do that the police couldn’t?
Well for one thing . . . good grief, had Alan called Rose & Co. to call off the ‘Where’s Peter?’ campaign? If not, I’d better do that right away. I booted up the laptop, found the agent’s website, and saw with dismay that the search took centre stage. I called instantly.
Busy. Of course. Everyone in the country would be calling. What had I done? I buried my head in my hands and tried to remember how to make the phone keep placing the call until someone answered, and finally gave up. Instead I sent an urgent email, not at all sanguine about the results. This was all my doing, and it was appalling, but if I couldn’t do anything about it, I couldn’t. All right. Set that aside for the moment. Next thing.
Plainly the urgent matter was finding Jo. But what could we do about that?
Very little, I concluded, that the police weren’t already doing. We could ask Paul and his mother about her usual favourite places, but what good would that do? She wouldn’t be in any of them. If she was able to run away again, she’d try to get to the police. If not . . .
I wished I could push the picture out of my head, the picture of that sturdy, sensible woman held prisoner somewhere, prisoner to a man with a history of violence. The only dim ray of hope was that he wanted her alive, because only she knew where to find Sarah.
But she didn’t! Oh, dear heaven, she didn’t! Alan and I had removed Sarah and Paul, hidden them in London in the most luxurious security cell imaginable. What if Jo, in desperation, told whatever-his-name-was where to find them, and he went, and they weren’t there! From what I’d heard of him, I was sure he would explode into a fury of hatred and anger, and . . .
Calm down, Dorothy, I told myself firmly. She’s kept the secret all these years. She won’t tell now.
She wasn’t being tortured before, the other voice retorted.
I started pacing. I wished I had a warm cat to hug. I wished Alan would come back. I wished I didn’t feel so bloody useless.
Think, Dorothy. Think. What do you know, what skills do you have, that might help?
Well. I knew something about the general situation, certainly. I hadn’t taught all those years without learning things, things I would very much rather not have known, about abused children and their mothers. Sometimes, though rarely, it was the fathers who were abused. I knew about abuse turning into a family trait, children growing up thinking nightly fights were a family norm.
I didn’t see how that could help, but I tucked it away.
I’d done volunteer social work of various kinds for many years, through my church in America. It had mostly been of the soup kitchen variety, but I’d brushed elbows with a good many professionals along the way. Did that perhaps give me some insight into the way they think? Could that help me find Jo?
I shrugged and kept pacing.
When I’d first moved to England, I’d been able to ask questions and generally pry into matters that were none of my business, because I was an outsider, who didn’t count. It was the shipboard romance pattern. Anyone could say anything to me, because I was a foreigner who might never see them again.
That didn’t work any more. My accent and vocabulary had altered enough that, while the English still knew I was American, my American friends said I sounded perfectly English. I was no longer a foreigner, quite. My friends in Sherebury thought of me as almost belonging. I never would, completely, of course. My ancestors were from Indiana, not Belleshire. But I was enough one of them that they were cautious about what they said in front of me. I knew too many official sorts of people to whom I might pass it on.
In these parts, though, I was instantly recognized as an American, even before I opened my mouth. Furthermore, I was a tourist, that species of humanity both welcomed into a community for the commercial value, and despised for the nuisance factor.
Hmm. That element of negligibility might prove useful, after all.
What else?
I racked my brains, my eyes surveying the room restlessly, as though the very walls would give me an inspiration.
My searching eyes lit on the book I’d been trying to read. My mind had been too fidgety to stay with it for long, but it didn’t matter, since I knew it virtually by heart. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night is, for me, the finest mystery novel ever written, with development of character and setting worthy of the finest ‘straight’ fiction, with intriguing subplots, fascinating jaunts into Sayers’ philosophy of life and her idea of a university . . . meat enough to warrant the many re-readings I had devoted to it. The book was nearly falling apart, but I was loath to throw it away, as it was a Gollancz edition with the brilliant red and yellow cover so characteristic of its period.
The point, my wandering mind informed me sternly, was that I was an avid and experienced reader of detective fiction. I knew every plot device that had ever been used. I knew, in theory, how to interrogate witnesses, how to interpret clues. I knew that, in contravention of the tradition of English common law of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, everyone should be considered a liar until proven to be truthful. I knew how to be an amateur detective . . . or at least I ought to.
I made myself a cup of tea and sat down again, thinking hard until Alan came home. By the time he walked in the door, I had a plan.
He had brought plenty of food, for us and, I saw with misgivings, for the dog. It romped inside after him and came bouncing over to me to administer a thorough sniffing. I patted it gingerly on the head and went to the kitchen to help Alan unpack.
‘I’ll get a collar and lead this afternoon,’ he said, putting packages away. ‘He’s full of energy and needs exercise, and the rain should stop soon.’
‘Alan.’
He turned to look at me, surprised at my tone.
‘He’s not our dog.’
‘Well, I know that!’
‘Do you?’ I pointed to the tins and boxes of food and treats, the new bowls. ‘He belongs to someone, my dear. We can’t just . . . appropriate him. And we have two cats.’
Alan’s smile faded, and I felt awful. ‘Most dogs get along well with cats,’ he said, ‘given the right introductions. He’s a friendly fellow.’
‘Oh, love. I didn’t mean to be heartless. He is friendly, but it’s just . . . I’ve never had a dog, and I don’t know how to treat one. And he’s come from somewhere. Somebody’s probably frantic, wondering where he’s gone.’
‘I had dogs, always, when I was a boy. You know I love cats, but . . . oh, well, you’re right. We’ll have to try to find his owner.’
‘We could just let him out. He’ll probably go home.’
Alan said nothing, but opened the back door. He looked like a small boy who had just had his ice cream cone snatched by a bully.
The dog gave us both a friendly smile and trotted outside. Before Alan could shut the door again, the dog came back, shook the rain
off his coat, and sat down, tail thumping.
‘Oh, well.’ I conceded the battle . . . but not the war. ‘You’d better feed the poor thing, and I’ll feed us. Then we can make some plans.’
‘Yes, we need to decide where and how to advertise. The local newspaper, I suppose, and perhaps posters . . .’
‘I meant, about finding Jo.’
Alan turned slightly red in the face and became very busy opening a can of dog food.
TWENTY-FOUR
Alan and I ate our breakfast in a slightly strained silence and then sat down on the couch to try to map out a plan of action. The dog, full of food, settled himself comfortably between us, and soon began to snore softly.
I sternly refused to give in to his obvious charm. He wasn’t our dog. And Sam and Emmy would have forty fits if we brought him home. However, this wasn’t the time to quarrel about it. We had more pressing issues.
‘Alan, I’ve had some ideas. Obviously the first thing we have to do is tell the police everything we learned yesterday. There are lots of leads they can follow up that we can’t, or not nearly as effectively.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you admit that the police can do their job better than you can.’
Oh, dear. He was still sulking about the dog. Amazing how like a little boy a man of seventy can be at times. I hurried on. ‘I’ve never claimed to be better than the police at their job. What I can do, sometimes better than they, is ask questions. I’m not only an old woman, I’m a foreigner. I’ve lost that edge in Sherebury, where everybody knows me and knows I’m married to you. They’ve become more cautious about telling me things. But here I’m just an American tourist. Almost nobody knows me. I think I can go around and talk to people, around here and in Broadway, and who knows? I might just pick up something interesting.’
Alan made a non-committal noise. ‘Questions about what?’
‘I don’t know yet. Social work, maybe. The problem of abuse. It’ll come to me. The thing is, I have to do it alone.’
This time the noise was definitely displeased. ‘I think that’s a very bad idea. You’re looking for a man who’s already killed, for apparently no reason at all. I’m coming with you.’
The Evil that Men Do Page 16
