Elizabeth Is Missing (28 page)

“I’m Katy, Grandma,” she says. “And you live with us now. Remember? You moved in with us.”

I look back along the road. The rubbish on the street swells round the lamppost. And suddenly I remember what I was going to do.

“Oh, Helen, I have to go to town,” I say, turning. “I have to go to that office.”

“What office, Grandma? You can’t. We’re home now.”

“I have to go to the
Echo
’s offices,” I say.

“Why? You going to be a papergirl?”

I can’t smile, it’s too important that I don’t forget. “No,” I say. “I have to put one of those things in the paper. A thing. For Elizabeth.” I can’t think of the word. “To say I’m looking for her.”

“What?” Helen says, walking beside me. “Like an advert?”

I’m not sure if that’s what I mean, but I nod anyway.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says. “I don’t think Mum would like it.”

“Aren’t I your mum?” I say.

“No, you’re my grandma. I’m Katy. Katy, your granddaughter.”

I stop and look at her face. Yes, I know her. Of course I do. But apart from that piercing in her lip she really could be Helen, years ago, with her blondish curls. Except she looks happier somehow. My daughter must be a good mother, I think. Better, anyway, than I was. We walk back to the new house. There are seeds scattered over the pavement; the head of a sunflower has been pulled off and is lying on a wall. Katy gets out a key.

“This isn’t right,” I say to her, pointing. “This isn’t my house.”

Katy squeezes my hand in hers. “Come in for a bit anyway, Grandma,” she says. “Mum said she’d get some coffee cake.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Well, what about a banana sandwich then? You liked that yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” I say. Banana sandwiches were a real treat when I was a girl, and I even used to ask for them instead of dinner. I remember I was hoping to have a banana sandwich for dinner the day I met Nancy from the Station Hotel again.

I was in the queue for the greengrocer’s. It was a long queue and there was a line of prams parked outside, each with a little head rising up from time to time to squawk for its mother. The pile of bananas just inside the window was what everyone was queuing for; it was huge and looked like it would last to my turn, but I tried not to think too hard about them in case that caused them to disappear. I leant against the brick wall of the shop and made faces at the babies in their prams, the smell of sun-warmed fruit washing about me like bathwater.

Ma had sent me out with the ration books as she and Dad were spending the day talking to the police and following up any leads for Sukey. Sergeant Needham had suggested they retrace her steps from home to the hotel, from the hotel to our house, and from our house to hers, looking out for anywhere she might have been “lost.” I had a fairly good idea that the sergeant was just suggesting things to keep them occupied, but I hadn’t said anything to Ma. She’d seemed more hopeful than she’d been for months, and I hadn’t the heart to tell her I’d already followed those routes myself, again and again, looking for answers.

Instead I’d set myself the task of getting the ingredients for a really good dinner, but I hadn’t had much success with the shopping so far. Someone had told me there was haddock at the fishmonger’s and I’d rushed off to see if I could get hold of some, but by the time I reached the front of the queue there was only cod left. So all I had so far was a tin of Heinz tomato soup. If I could get us a banana each, though, that would be a bit of a triumph.

I was still six or seven places from the front when Nancy tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hello. It’s you,” she said. “I thought I recognized you. Feeling better now?”

I said I was.

“And any news about your sister?”

“None.”

She nodded. “Sorry about that.” She shifted her shopping bag from hand to hand, puffing her flat cheeks out. “What are you after? I’m for the bananas if they hold out. My husband loves them.”

“Was it you who signed Sukey’s name on the register?” I asked.

“Oh. At the hotel, you mean? Yes, that’s right.”

“Why?”

“Frank asked me.”

“But couldn’t Sukey have signed it?”

“She was outside in the van. He wanted to pay and get the key and everything first so he could take her straight up to a room. She was in a bit of a state, he said. Poor love, so was he. Worried for her, I expect. That wretched mad woman had got into their house again. Not that I’m one to talk—my husband’s got his own problems.”

“So you did see her? Sukey, I mean. I thought you told the police you hadn’t?”

“Er . . .”

“You saw Frank take her to her room?” I stared up at the pout of the woman’s lips, hoping for even the meagrest description of Sukey. The idea of her living, still in our town, our world, dressed in her own clothes and fresh from dinner at our house, made me feel weightless for a moment.

“No. That’s right,” the woman said, causing a crashing sensation inside me. “I had to cover for one of the telephonists, so I missed them going up. He was going to sneak your sister in as soon as he had the key, to make sure that mad woman didn’t see where she’d gone. Seemed a bit over the top to me, but I s’pose once you’ve had a fright like that you want to make sure you don’t have another.”

“So you never saw them go up?”

“Well, I saw Frank come back down—I was back on reception again by that time. Poor Frank, he really was in a state, so worried for his wife. I said, ‘Why don’t you stay with her?’ But he couldn’t, something he had to do that night in London. I didn’t ask too much about it, because, well, he’s a charmer that one, and wouldn’t hurt a fly, but you don’t get to sell razors that cheap without knowing a few of the wrong sort of people. My husband has to be clean-shaven, you see, he can’t bear even a day’s growth on his chin. I think it must remind him of the camp. He was a prisoner of war, near Singapore. You knew that, did you? Anyway, I offered to look in on her, but Frank said she’d gone straight to bed. And the bed certainly looked as though it had been slept in next day, covers rumpled about and that.”

T
he inside of this drawer smells of old putty rubbers and is stained and marked, but the things it contains are clean and new: unopened rolls of Polo mints, boxes of tissues, sheets of aspirin. A few pictures of a family, smiling, in various places in Germany, have been clipped together; they must be cuttings from a magazine, though I can’t think why I’d want them. And there is a packet of lampposts, tiny lampposts with lead through the middle. The right word for them is gone, and I pick one up, trying to remember it, pressing the writing end into the wood of the drawer until the tip breaks off. It’s satisfying and I pick up another just to break it.

The doorbell rings. I drop the pencil and bang into a bookcase in my hurry to leave the room. There are two dirty cups on a shelf. I collect them and in the hall realize one has some tea in it. I drink it up, though it’s cold, and then put both cups on the bottom stair. I stumble back. The staircase is at the wrong angle. It doesn’t point at the door any more. I try a couple of steps. They’re solid enough. The doorbell rings. Twice. Three times. It’s a harsh ring, not at all tuneful. I open the door and a man bursts through.

“You really have gone too far,” he says.

He’s waving something, shaking it at me, but it moves too fast and I can’t see what it is. I back away, finding myself against the banisters. I can’t work out how they can be here. They’re in the wrong place.

“I mean. A bloody advert. It’s the fucking limit.”

“The limit,” I say, looking at the stairs. They’ve shifted and I can’t understand it.

“Yes, exactly. Hey, are you listening?”

“Do you know how the stairs moved like this?” I say.

The man is in the middle of taking a deep breath. He stops. “What?”

He’s familiar, but I don’t know him, and anyway I can’t think about him at the moment. “The stairs,” I say. “They’ve moved. They face the wrong way. How could that happen, d’you think? Has there been an earthquake or something?”

“What are you going on about?” He is very tall, this boy. But stooped, like Douglas.

“The steps,” I say. “Douglas. Douglas must have moved them.” I can’t think what I was going to say. My thoughts have got tangled somehow.

“Who’s Douglas?”

“Our lodger.”

The man seems to crouch, very slightly. “Upstairs, is he?” He puts a hand on the newel post and the banisters shake a little under his weight as he leans to peer up at the landing.

“Upstairs?” I say, following his gaze. “Who’s upstairs?” I look to the man, feeling a sudden shiver. I wonder who could be up there. Not only that, but the banisters are in the wrong place. They’re in the wrong place and I’m frightened. I study the man’s throat above his shirt collar; it is raw from shaving. This is Peter. This is Elizabeth’s son. I feel my stomach fill with anger.

“Was it you?” I say. “Was it you who moved the stairs?” That must be the explanation. “It’s exactly the kind of spiteful thing you would do.”

“Eh?” He rubs the back of his neck, frowns.

There is silence for a second. I hear a rook cawing, cawing in the distance. I am making fists of my hands. “Must have been money in it for you.”

Peter glances up at the landing again. “I haven’t moved your fucking stairs,” he hisses.

“How do you explain it then?”

“I don’t know, that’s how they were built.”

“Oh, ridiculous. What a thing to say. That sort of lie might work on your mother, but it doesn’t wash with me.”

“Shut up about my mother!” Peter shouts, raising both hands.

The front door opens behind him. It’s Helen. Helen with the heavy, honeyish smell of wisteria, and the rumble of traffic and the rustle of the orange plastic bags in her hands. These are the ones that make her grimace and feel guilty, the ones she screws up into egg-shaped balls and hides in drawers.

“What’s going on?” she says.

“This man has moved my staircase, Helen,” I say. “I think I know why he’s done it, but I don’t know how. Make him tell me how he did it.”

Peter turns to Helen. “Your mother has put an advert in the paper asking people to contact her if they’ve seen my mum.”

He thrusts a folded newspaper at her and Helen lifts the bags to show her hands are full. Katy slips through the door behind her, picking up some cups from a step. She goes into the kitchen and I wonder if she will make me some toast, but a moment later she’s back for the bags, untangling them from her mother’s fingers.

“Better hide these, huh, Mum? Don’t want anyone to know you use
plastic bags
.” The last two words are said in a whisper, and I wonder if Helen hasn’t heard. She doesn’t react anyway, only looks at Peter.

“An advert?” she says.

“It’s one thing calling me or leaving notes at the house. But this.”

Helen finally takes the newspaper; she glances at the folded page and then waves it at me. I try to catch it, but she isn’t looking and it misses my hand.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I don’t know when—how—she could have put it in.”

Peter shakes his head. I start to do the same. He shakes his head as he walks out of the house, and Helen darts after him, footsteps crunching across the gravel. Her voice is raised, but I can’t make out the words. A car starts up and drives off.

“Well, that was a nice welcome home,” Helen says, coming back in. She opens the newspaper she’s carrying. “Here it is. ‘Looking for Elizabeth Markham. If you have any information please call—’ Oh, God. It’s the old house number. I didn’t know you’d placed this.”

“No. Wasn’t me,” I say.

“What made you think of doing that?” she says. “Putting an ad in the paper, I mean.”

I peer up at the landing. “‘Women. Contact your husbands,’” I say.

Helen hands me the newspaper and goes to put the kettle on.

“Contact your husbands.” I kept that article. And I gathered any stories I could find about people leaving home. Advertisements, too, men asking their wives to come back or write to them, parents hoping for news from missing sons. There weren’t really that many—the reporter had obviously overestimated for effect—but each one I found seemed to catch at me like a parachute line, my hopes winging their way into the air. I knew, of course, that even if a hundred men and women had left without a word it didn’t mean Sukey had. But it was better than the other possibility, that the murderer who had hurt those other two women had hurt Sukey, too. It meant there was a chance, that one day we might find her again. I tried asking Ma which fishmonger’s Sukey went to, but it only made her cry, and Dad was cross.

I wanted to find out what Douglas thought—after all, he always read every bit of the paper—but I was beginning to be frightened of him. I couldn’t rid myself of the image of his face, looming and angry, as he’d smeared the lipstick across my cheeks and chin, and though I’d spent hours putting cold cream on, just to wipe it off again, I still felt as if a waxy stain lingered. I started to watch him in the house, thinking about how he hadn’t seemed to grieve for his mother, and how he had stared at Sukey, and how that neighbour had said he was at Sukey’s house all the time. And I remembered the policeman saying he recognized him, and the food going missing, and the umbrella in his room that was just like the mad woman’s. And his saying he was going to the pictures and then never seeming to have seen any films. If he caught me watching he’d scowl and I would think about the film villains he looked like, but sometimes he would duck his head in that old shy way and I would think, It’s only Doug, and feel sorry for suspecting him of anything at all.

With no one to talk to, I was left to follow the meagre advice I found in the newspaper cuttings. I looked to see if there were any clues to where Sukey might have gone amongst the clothes that Frank had given me, or in the suitcase the police had returned. One man in an article had left a brochure for Torquay in a drawer, and they’d found him that way. I remembered Douglas running his hands round the lining of the suitcase, and did the same, but I didn’t find anything.

Eventually I showed the collection of cuttings to Frank when he took me back to the Fiveways. I was drinking my ginger ale, not very happy about being in a pub with him again. It was quieter, though, what with the shortage of beer, and smelled of damp rather than tobacco smoke, and Frank seemed to know fewer people now. When I showed him the papers, I had a vague idea he might cry, but he didn’t.