Mr Douglas nodded. ‘I’m not that worried. I’m sure it’s nothing serious.’
She and Patrick had exchanged a glance. Faces solemn, eyes laughing.
All day she’d found herself watching him, enjoying his ready humour, noticing the small courtesies, his good manners with everyone in the group. He watched out for her just as much, opening doors for her, making sure she was fine, that she was happy with how it was all going. The two of them also managed to have lots of snatched conversations, quick exchanges about the tour, or Patrick asking about previous trips she’d worked on, Harriet asking about his pre-Willoughby days, about America, and Boston. She’d been surprised again how relaxed he was about his acting career. He didn’t seem to do much work these days, yet he didn’t appear anxious about it. He was more interested in talking about books he’d read, wondering if she had read them too, or wanting to talk about changes he’d noticed in England since his last visit. The more they talked, brief as the conversations were, the more it was changing from her being the guide and him being the special guest. It wasn’t just the feeling that the two of them worked very well together. Something else was happening as well. She’d become acutely aware of him. She knew if he was nearby, if he had left a room, if he had come back into a room. Not in a protective ‘looking after the special guest’ way. It was something different.
Harriet came up the stairs again and knocked on Mrs Kempton’s door. It was opened immediately. The room was almost full. Mrs Kempton had been joined by Miss Talbot, Mrs Randall and Miss Boyd. It was like a senior citizens’ sleepover. They gave her an enthusiastic welcome.
‘Oh Harriet, you look beautiful,’ Miss Talbot exclaimed. ‘Like a sea creature.’
‘Really? Not a jellyfish, I hope?’
‘Oh no, like a nymph. Something glorious like that.’
Harriet had changed out of the yellow uniform into a special dress she had brought with her. She had tried it on in a boutique in Melbourne several months earlier and known immediately it was something out of the ordinary. It was made of dark green silk, and both the colour and the material seemed to catch the light in an unusual way, glistening almost. The design left her arms bare, while the scooped neckline showed off her skin and skimmed the tops of her breasts. It fitted her body, ending just below her knees. She had felt different as soon as she tried it on. Beautiful, confident, adventurous, as though she was in costume for an acting role, or an actress preparing to step onto the red carpet for a premiere. The boutique assistant had got into the spirit, bringing over pieces of expensive jewellery for Harriet to try on, making suggestions for make-up and matching glamorous hairstyles. She had also produced the perfect matching shoes. The toes were pointed, the heels high. Harriet had ignored the price and bought them immediately. She didn’t regret it. She felt different when she was wearing them, too. Elegant and feminine. She carried a silk wrap with her, in a darker green than her dress. While she’d been getting ready in her room she’d tried to remember the jewellery and make-up suggestions the boutique assistant had given her. ‘Go dramatic,’ the woman had said. ‘The dress deserves it.’ She was right. The ornate earrings, smoky eyeshadow, carefully applied eyeliner and darker shade of red lipstick did suit the dress.
‘I love your make-up.’ Miss Boyd said, inspecting her closely. ‘Have you had professional training?’
‘No,’ Harriet said, surprised. ‘I taught myself really.’
‘It’s beautiful, Harriet. Could you make my eyes look like yours?’
‘And do you think I would look better with a darker lipstick?’ Mrs Kempton said. ‘Mine’s a bit too pink, don’t you think?’
‘Could you do us too, Harriet?’ Miss Talbot asked.
Harriet checked her watch. There was plenty of time. Clive wasn’t due for another twenty minutes or so. ‘I’d love to,’ she said. She went back to her room and fetched her make-up bag. By the time she came back, the four ladies were lined up on the bed, side by side, towels around their necks protecting their outfits.
She started with Miss Talbot. First she helped her fasten the clasp of her bright pink resin necklace, and do up the button at the back of her satin flares. Together they found a shade of lipstick and blush that matched both the necklace and the flares.
Miss Talbot lifted her face, sighing in pleasure as Harriet gently applied the make-up. ‘We’ll have to take a photo so I can remember this. But you have to be in it too, Harriet. I know, I’ll get Patrick to take it. He’ll know all about cameras and he can teach us how to pose properly too.’
Before Harriet could stop her, Miss Talbot had leaned across to the phone, rung reception and asked to be put through to Patrick Shawcross’s room.
‘Patrick, it’s Emily. No, you don’t need to call me Miss Talbot, I told you that. Would you please be able to come and take our photo? Harriet’s making us beautiful and we want to treasure the moment. Oh, thank you. We’re in room twenty-three, second floor.’ She hung up, very pleased with herself. ‘He’ll be here in a minute.’
Harriet finished Miss Talbot’s make-up and was just applying a soft mauve to Miss Boyd’s eyelids when there was a knock at the door.
Miss Talbot answered it. ‘Patrick, hello. Look, aren’t I a picture?’ She did a little spin. ‘I feel like a girl again.’
Harriet watched her with great amusement, then glanced over her shoulder at him. ‘Thanks, Patrick. We’re nearly ready. I just have two more sets of eyes, three lips and a necklace to do.’
‘And my belt again,’ Miss Talbot said, twisting around and refastening the buckle on her silver chainlink belt. ‘They don’t make clothes the way they used to. Patrick, do you want to come back in a minute? When we’ll be really perfect?’
‘I’m happy to wait, Emily.’
There wasn’t room for him to come in. He leaned against the doorway. He had changed his clothes too, Harriet noticed. He was wearing a light grey suit, beautifully cut, over a white shirt. He’d either showered or been outside for a walk. She could see drops of water in his dark curls. He was talking very seriously to Miss Talbot, who was explaining in detail how her camera worked. He glanced up at her and she had to look away. She had that unsettling feeling again. That the room was full of people, but she was conscious only of him.
Harriet added a little more blush to Miss Boyd’s cheeks and a dusting of powder. She had to concentrate. Her hands seemed to be shaking slightly. She moved to Mrs Kempton, choosing a pale brown eyeshadow, and just a touch of lipgloss. Mrs Randall only needed foundation, a light grey eyeshadow and mascara. All three women were like purring cats, their faces turned up to her, as she went back and forth doing the final touches, smoothing eyeshadow here, a little bit more lipstick there, some light finishing powder on each of them.
‘I’m really not an expert,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’
‘I don’t mind what I look like. It feels so nice having it put on,’ Miss Boyd said. ‘You’ve got such a gentle touch, Harriet.’
They were finally done. She stood back and watched as they took turns looking into the mirror, delighted with themselves.
Miss Boyd nearly cried. ‘I love it. You’ve made me look years younger.’
Mrs Kempton put her hands to her cheeks. ‘Oh, thank you, Harriet, I love it too.’
Mrs Randall didn’t say anything, just gave Harriet a warm, happy smile.
‘Photo time, everyone,’ Miss Talbot declared, clapping her hands. She was getting quite giddy. ‘And quickly. We may never look this good again.’
Harriet insisted on taking the first photo: Patrick with the four women. Their fingers brushed briefly as he passed her the camera. She was aware of not just him, but of herself now, too. Of how she felt when he was near her.
Miss Talbot took over then, wanting different combinations, moving them all back and forth. ‘I’ve brought twenty films with me,’ she declared. ‘I don’t care if I use them all up tonight. Harriet, Patrick, I want one of the two of you together.’
&nbs
p; She moved them until they were side by side. ‘Put your arm around her, Patrick, that’s it,’ she called. ‘Perfect. Nice and close, now.’
Harriet felt his arm touch her back, his fingers against her bare skin. A combination of hot and cold sensation shot right through her. She didn’t dare look at him. She also didn’t tell Miss Talbot that her thumb was over the lens. She was worried her voice would sound strange.
Miss Boyd pointed it out instead.
‘Never mind,’ Miss Talbot said. ‘I’ll take a few more. Back together again, Patrick and Harriet. Closer, that’s it.’
The merest touch of his fingers on her skin felt like a caress. Harriet could barely breathe. She felt like closing her eyes in pleasure, not smiling at a camera.
There was time for one more. ‘Patrick, with all of you,’ Harriet said, moving away from him, needing to take back a bit of control. She arranged them all, Patrick in the centre, Miss Talbot and Miss Boyd on one side, Mrs Kempton and Mrs Randall on the other. Another brief touch, her hand on his sleeve as she moved him into place, and that sensation again, as if electricity was zipping back and forth between them. She arranged Mrs Kempton’s scarf and fixed the collar of Miss Talbot’s fluffy cardigan. The simple actions calmed her. She was imagining this, she told herself.
‘Now we’re ready,’ she said, taking a step back, smiling at the looks on their faces. ‘What do you think, Patrick? Aren’t they gorgeous?’
‘Beautiful,’ he said.
He was looking at her when he said it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Austin and Nina parked the car in a side street down the road from the tourism college. It was part of a modern campus in the middle of Bath, the sleek concrete lines of the building incongruous after the tall elegant terraces and wide streets they had passed on the way. Nina had directed him in the same way she spoke, quickly, stopping and starting.
‘That’s the tourism section over there,’ she said, pointing to a wing of a four-storey building. ‘You could come back tomorrow, of course, when all the staff will probably be here. But as I said, you might see a few of her class and a couple of her lecturers tonight. Where are you staying by the way? Have you booked anywhere? Is that all your luggage?’
‘I haven’t booked anywhere yet. And yes, that’s all.’
‘A man who travels light. I used to know a quote about that too, but I forget it. Stay with me. We have a sofa bed in the living room.’
‘I’ll be fine in a guesthouse.’
‘No, don’t be mad. I insist. Lara would insist too.’
She would, too. She had already invited him to stay, when they had spoken the previous week. When she had seemed fine. No inkling of this at all. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure.’
He followed Nina across the open square. ‘I met Lara here one night, last month,’ she said. ‘We were going to see a film, she came out of the classroom over this way.’ She stopped a passing student and confirmed it. ‘This way, Austin.’ He had to walk quickly to keep up.
Half an hour later, Austin had spoken to two of Lara’s classmates and her lecturer. They seemed puzzled at his concern. No, they hadn’t been surprised when she wasn’t in class the past couple of days. She was expected to be away on the Willoughby tour after all. And no, they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary with her behaviour before then, either.
Austin sat down at one of the desks. Nina and the lecturer, Brendan, sat opposite. He was in his late thirties, tall, lean, with glasses and tousled brown hair.
‘Why do you think something is wrong?’ Brendan asked.
Austin tried to explain it again. ‘It’s not like her. She doesn’t do things like this, just disappear.’
‘Maybe she felt it was time she did? I know I’ve wanted to make a run for it now and then.’
‘Maybe.’ Austin was starting to feel embarrassed. It had felt like the right thing to do when he was in Berlin, to drop everything and rush over here, like a man with a mission, the heroic rescuer. But now he was actually here, he wasn’t so sure.
‘You could talk to a couple more of her fellow students, if you like,’ Brendan said. ‘She might have mentioned something to them. They’ll be back tomorrow. Or you can have a look at her computer. There might be a few clues there.’
‘Clues?’ Nina’s eyes were bright. ‘This is feeling like a detective program now. What sort of clues?’
Brendan shrugged. ‘Maybe she had written a letter, or looked up some websites or something. That would give you an idea of where she might have gone.’
Austin and Nina followed Brendan over to a desk in the corner. ‘The students move around a bit, but Lara generally worked on this one. I don’t think any of the students keep much on the desktop, though. They save their work to disk usually. They use the computer more for research purposes, web surfing, that sort of thing.’
‘We’ve been getting emails from her. Would this be where she sent them from?’
‘Probably. Either from here, or one of the Internet cafes in town. But she’d have a password for that. You don’t know it, I suppose? Or know who her server is?’
Austin shook his head. It would have felt wrong reading her emails, in any case. As it was it felt again like he was prying, looking at her computer like this. As it booted up, he saw neatly arranged folders with Lara’s name on them appear on the screen. He hesitated and then clicked on one. The documents inside were also neatly labelled. Week 1, Week 2, all the way through to what must have been last week, Week 12. He clicked on one, but it was blank. That’s right, the lecturer had said they saved everything on disk. So no clues there.
‘She was doing well,’ Brendan said. ‘Some great ideas. Really dedicated, too.’
‘She was looking forward to this,’ Austin said. He remembered getting the call from her, when she found out she’d got the industry scholarship for the three month course. ‘It’s the best one in the whole world, Austie!’ He hadn’t heard her so happy in a long time.
Nina pulled up a chair beside the computer. ‘If she packed a suitcase, she must have been going somewhere some distance away,’ she said. ‘So she’d have had to book, wouldn’t she? Maybe she’d have booked on the Internet?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Brendan said. ‘She could have caught a train. Picked up a flight at the airport on stand-by. Hired a car. She could be anywhere.’
‘I suppose there’s no way of checking what sites she’d been looking at anyway, is there?’ Nina asked.
The lecturer nodded. ‘There is, actually. It’s simple.’ He leaned across and moved the mouse on Lara’s computer. ‘You go to Internet Explorer, then View, then Explorer Bar and then History. And there it is.’ A long list of sites appeared on the screen.
Nina whistled. ‘Everything you look at on the web gets recorded? I didn’t know that.’
‘Nothing ever leaves a computer,’ Brendan said. ‘Even if you delete it, it’s still there on the hard drive somewhere.’
Austin’s hopes rose. ‘If she has gone somewhere, she might have been looking up info about it, mightn’t she? We just need to see what travel sites she’s been looking at …’ He scanned the long list of sites Lara had accessed. There was address after address of tourism sites, airline booking sites, information for travellers. He hit his palm against his forehead in a gesture of stupidity. ‘Sorry, I’ve just remembered where we are. A tourism college.’
The lecturer gave a wry laugh. ‘Well, yes, I’d be more surprised if she hadn’t been looking up travel websites. Most of the travel business is computerised these days.’
‘And I couldn’t know which of these Lara had looked at most recently anyway, or for how long, could I?’
‘A technician might be able to tell you. There’s probably a way of checking dates and times, how long they’d been looked at, but I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do it.’
Nina picked up the mouse and scrolled through more of the history. ‘There’s some news sites, too. Telephone direct
ories. Search engines, info on some cruise ships …’
The lecturer nodded. ‘That was last week’s project. We asked the students to put together some themed fantasy cruises.’
‘That explains that one then.’ She kept scrolling, reading aloud as she went. ‘The Met Office, a book review site, more cruise ships, and then a whole bunch of Irish sites. One, two, three …’ she stopped counting aloud. ‘About ten of them. See, Irish newspapers. Maps. Would that have been for her course, too?’ she asked the lecturer.
‘Perhaps, though not necessarily. Our focus this semester was themed travel. That’s why Lara applied to come here. It was in line with what she was doing at home in Australia.’
Austin moved his chair closer. ‘She had a few links with Ireland herself, though. Her mother was Irish, at least she was born in Ireland, but she grew up in England. Before she and Lara’s father emigrated to Australia.’
‘Didn’t you say her mum and dad were killed in Ireland?’ Nina asked. ‘Were they back there on holiday?’
‘Her parents were killed there?’ Brendan said. ‘When? Recently?’
Austin shook his head. ‘About twenty-four years ago.’
‘When she was only a child? Oh, how sad.’
Nina was looking at the screen again. ‘Maybe that’s what’s happened. She’s on the other side of the world, feeling a long way from home and what family she has got, so she’s gone looking for some connections. Her dad was English, did you say? Did he have family left here in England?’
Austin shook his head. He knew that much.
Nina was undeterred. ‘All right, so she decides to track down some of her mother’s Irish relatives. She might have found instant cousins or great uncles that she didn’t know she had.’ She glanced at the screen. ‘Maybe she put an ad in the—’ she squinted to read the name on the screen, ‘the Irish Times, asking for information. Where was her mother from?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know much about her mother or her father, to tell you the truth.’
‘There’s no one at home you can ask?’ the lecturer asked.
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