Elizabeth Is Missing (29 page)

“So,” he said. “You think she’s left me, is that it?”

“Well, wouldn’t that be better than the alternative? What happened to that woman at the Grosvenor Hotel?”

“P’raps.”

He was staring into his beer glass, where there was only an inch of liquid left. I looked at the deep lines on his forehead, shadowed under the pub lights, and at the way his hands turned the glass, and I waited for him to finish the drink.

“You’d prefer her to be dead?” I asked, but I couldn’t believe he’d really want that, and I didn’t like saying “dead.”

His hands didn’t stop moving, the glass smoothing the skin of his fingers to whiteness, and when he looked at me it was with tired eyes.

He sighed. “No,” he said. “No, of course I wouldn’t prefer that. He’s a maniac, that man: did you read the stories through? There’s killing, that’s one thing, and there’s what he did, and that’s another.” Frank raised his hands, the last of the beer slopping about in the glass. “I mean, accidents happen, they happen and there’s nothing you can do, no way of undoing them. But what he did was no accident.”

I agreed the man was a maniac, and that his killings hadn’t been accidental, and I asked Frank again if he thought Sukey might just have gone off somewhere, but he refused to discuss it any more. He just wanted me to remember Sukey’s story, to tell him again how they first met.

“And then she said: ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry,’” I repeated, hardly having to remember at all, and watching the beer glass turning, and feeling the newspaper twisted up in my hand. “‘I just know it. He’s the man for me.’”

When Frank walked me home that night, handing me a parcel of ham for Ma and standing again at the corner to watch me go in, I saw Mrs. Winners hovering at her window. She was talking on the telephone as I went past her hedge, and she ran out after me.

“That mad woman’s been prowling about again,” she said, looking along the street. “I’ve called the constabulary, but I’d get inside quick-like, Maud.”

She noticed Frank, but you couldn’t see his face where he stood, in front of the streetlamp, his hat pulled forward.

“You courting already?” she said. “Why doesn’t he walk you home properly? Dad don’t like him?” She chuckled and pushed me on towards home. “Go on. Get inside. God knows what that woman is capable of.”

Frank was still at the corner when I looked back. I could see the lit end of his cigarette. So could Douglas.

“Been with him again,” he said, giving me a fright. He was standing in our dark front garden, looking out on the road.

“What are you doing there?” I said, annoyed.

“Your mum asked me to look out for you. The—er—that woman has been here.”

“Mrs. Winners said. I suppose you’re waiting to hand over our food.”

He nodded, not seeming to have heard me, and stayed standing in the front garden, staring down the street to the park. “Have you seen those new houses?” he asked, though he didn’t turn to me, and I wondered if it wasn’t a question for himself. “The ground was churned up for months, soil upon soil upon soil. And now it’s flat and smooth as anything. You’d never know what was under there.”

I moved closer to Douglas, expecting the smell of liquorice to breathe up from the earth, suddenly too frightened to cross the wet, shadowed garden alone, and I stared hard into the dark, trying to see what he saw. But I knew he meant the houses across the park, and there was no hope of seeing them from here, even during the day. I tried to remember what the new houses looked like, but all I could think of was the shell of Douglas’s old house with its pictures and ornaments arranged in the exposed room, as if someone might walk back in at any minute.

“People could live somewhere for a hundred years and never know what was beneath their feet,” he said. There was a rustle in the hedge and although it was probably just a hedgehog or something we both started. “You’d better go in,” he said.

I went round into the kitchen, Ma and Dad were clearing things away.

“Your dinner’s on the stove,” Ma said, not looking at me. I’d told her it was Frank I was seeing that evening, and she’d kept it from Dad. She’d also asked if Frank could get any soap or matches, because there were none in the shops. I held the package of ham up when Dad’s back was turned and her face brightened for a moment before the tired lines fell back into place.

I ate my mutton soup, expecting Douglas to come in any minute, but when I went upstairs he must still have been in the garden. I waited at my window to see him go in the kitchen door, listening to the occasional thuds of ripe apples falling from the tree, and it was nearly midnight when I finally caught sight of him, a black figure against the dark night. By then I’d finished writing to the murderer, Kenneth Lloyd Holmes.

“You smell funny,” I tell Helen as she bends to put down my tea.

“Smell funny how?” She is indignant, though I’ve hardly insulted her.

“It’s a sweet smell,” I say. “I’ll know it in a minute.” It’s sweet but it’s not pleasant. It gives me a headache and it makes me think of the mad woman; it makes me rub at my shoulder as if I’ve had a whack from an umbrella.

“Is it the tea?” Helen says, holding her own cup under my nose. “It’s fennel.”

“Ugh, yes, that’s it. How horrid. You haven’t given that to me, have you?”

“No, Mum.” She takes a sip from her mug and then grins. “I’d forgotten how much you hate the smell. You never used to let Tom and me buy liquorice allsorts when we were kids.” She pauses a moment as if this is a fond memory, though I remember her whining about it for hours when she was a child. “What are you writing?” she asks.

I look down at the paper under my hands. There are just scribbles. Lots of black scribbles on white. I can’t read them. Helen says something about Peter.

“Talk about overreacting. What does he think you’re going to do?” She pulls out a chair, scraping it along the floor, obscuring her last sentence.

I’m staring at a paper full of scribbles, meaningless scribbles. Except I have a feeling that some of them might be words and I just can’t read them. I want to ask Helen, but I’m embarrassed, frightened. When I look she is biting the inside of her cheek, staring at me. I wonder if she has guessed about the scribble-words.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’ll ask Elizabeth.” This seems the right thing to say. I smile at Helen for a moment, but there is something not right. I try to remember what it is. An idea keeps slipping away from me. “I can ask her, can’t I?” I look through my notes, but I don’t even have to read them. I know already. Elizabeth is missing.

I drop my pen and fold the scribble sheet up, putting it in my pocket. Helen takes my hand. She’s being nice, “making an effort.” I should, too. I wonder what I can say. “You look nice, dear.”

She makes a face.

“I am glad to have a daughter like you.”

She pats my hand and starts to get up.

“Can we go to see Patrick’s grave?” I ask. “I’d like to put some flowers on it.”

That’s done it. She smiles, widely, sitting again. She has dimples, my daughter. Still there, buried in her cheeks at fifty. I’d forgotten. It’s as if they were hiding and have finally broken out.

“We can go now,” she says.

And we get our coats on and get in the car. It’s all done in a whirl. We stop at some point, and Helen gets out. I hear the doors lock around me, see her mouth something through the glass and run off. The street isn’t busy, but the odd person walks past. I don’t recognize them, though. I don’t think I recognize them. A woman with long, dark hair turns the corner and comes towards me. She peers into the car as she goes by and stops, tapping on the window, pointing at me and then at the car door. She smiles and nods and says something I can’t quite hear through the glass. I pull at the handle, but the door won’t open, and I shake my head. The woman shrugs, waves, blows a kiss, and walks away. I wonder who she was. What she wanted.

Helen gets in suddenly, bringing a warm petrol smell with her.

“Was that Carla?” she says. “Just now?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t . . . Who did you say it was?”

“Carla.”

It’s not a name I know. Helen passes me a bunch of flowers and starts the car. “Are these for . . . that woman?” I ask. “Who did you say?”

“No, they’re for Dad.”

We pull out on to the road and I settle back, the flowers dusting me with water. I like being in the car. It’s comfortable and you don’t have to do anything. You can just sit. “Is he in hospital?”

“Who?”

“Your dad.”

We stop at a light and Helen looks at me. “Mum, we’re going to see Dad’s grave.”

“Oh, yes,” I say, and laugh. Helen frowns. “Oh, yes,” I say again.

The cemetery is huge, but it doesn’t take her long to find the grave. She must come more often than I’d realized. We stand in front of the stone. Reading it. Silently, because Helen doesn’t want me to read it aloud. We stand for a long time. I start to get tired. And it’s boring, waiting here. Helen has her head down, her hands clasped as if she’s praying. She doesn’t even believe in God. There’s a mound of earth not far from where we stand: someone’s going to be put into the soil—what do you call that? Planted, someone’s going to be planted. I stare at the earth for a long time. “Helen,” I say, “how do you grow summer squash?”

She doesn’t move, but murmurs her response. “You never stop asking that question,” she says.

I can’t remember if that’s true, though I don’t know why she’d lie about it, and I move away to think, drifting towards a great yew tree. There’s something frightening about its size and the way the dark branches block all the light from the ground. The grave here has a flat stone and the name has weathered badly. Only the date of death and r.i.p. are still readable. “That was the mad woman,” I say, as Helen catches up with me. “Her name was Violet, but everyone called her the mad woman.”

“How sad,” Helen says, standing with her head bowed again.

I think she’s overdoing the respectful pose. I screw my heel into the turf. “She chased me once,” I say. “She chased me and stole my sister’s comb. She ripped it from my hair.” As I speak I can feel the strands break, the pain as they tear from my scalp, but it doesn’t seem real, I’ve got the memory wrong somehow. “She watches me,” I say. “She knows all about me.”

“Who does?”

“Her.” My hands are in my pockets, so I point at the gravestone with my elbow. I want to kick the stone. I want to stamp on the earth beneath it. “She’s always there, always bloody watching.”

Helen’s head is no longer bowed. “She’s dead, Mum,” she says. “How can she be watching you?”

I don’t know. I can’t think. I pull my hands out of my pockets, looking for a note. There’s a folded piece of paper with black writing on it and I scrunch it into a ball. I want to shove it into the earth, push it in where the mad woman’s mouth is. But Helen takes my hand and lifts it, crushing the paper between her hand and mine. And in the little gap between our thumbs, I can just read the name Kenneth Lloyd Holmes.

He was the man arrested for the Grosvenor Hotel murder, the man I sent a letter to, asking if he’d killed my sister. I still hoped that Sukey had run away, but news of the murders was everywhere—even on the wireless. I said in the letter that I wouldn’t tell anyone, but that I had to know if he’d killed her. I described Sukey, her hair, the way she dressed, and told him which town we lived in. I thought if he didn’t write back it might mean she really was still alive. And if he said he’d done it, well, at least we’d know what had happened. I couldn’t think what to sign after “Yours sincerely”; I had a horror of putting my own name. In the end I put “Miss Lockwood” and asked the grocer at the top of the road to accept a letter for me addressed to that name. It was Reg’s mother ran the shop then. I remember her raising her eyebrows and laughing.

“Waiting for a love letter, eh?” she said. “Miss Lockwood. Vanity of vanities.” She smiled and tutted and I blushed and sweated under my coat. I was horribly embarrassed, knowing she would tell Mrs. Winners, at least. But she agreed to accept the letter and keep it for me, and that was all that mattered. I tucked the newspaper cuttings away in a drawer and waited. I never got a reply, but I told Frank I’d written the letter when I met him in the Pleasure Gardens one afternoon.

“Have you gone mad?” he said, hardly waiting to let out his lungful of cigarette smoke. “Writing to a nutcase like that? What made you think he’s got anything to do with Sukey?”

He stalked about in front of the bench I was sitting on, drawing violently on his cigarette so that the paper burnt down quick and bright. He’d arrived with packages of soap for Ma and chocolate for me—Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, which wasn’t anywhere in the shops. I bit a piece off, though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t eat it till I got home. It was so overwhelmingly creamy and sweet that I forgot for a moment we were arguing, and grinned up at him.

“And if he says he hasn’t done it, what does that prove?” he said, thankfully ignoring my grin.

I wrapped the rest of the chocolate up and put it in my pocket. “If he didn’t do it, then it proves she might still be alive.”

“No, Maud, it proves nothing.”

He flicked his cigarette into the river and shook another from its packet, all the time staring down at me. I had to stop my hand from straying to the pocket with the Dairy Milk in it.

“What exactly did you write?” he asked, once the new cigarette was lit.

I told him, trying to remember word for word, but he kept interrupting, repeating my phrases and coughing out smoke.

“‘She has the same look as the other girls you killed’? Bloody hell.”

I sucked my lips in at my own words. “It’s true, she does.”

“Why?” he shouted, and an old couple looked over from another bench. “Why are you doing this? You bloody little idiot. He wasn’t even here long enough to have met her. You’ll probably just end up as his next victim.”

I shrugged and turned away. The man had been caught and would be hanged, so that seemed unlikely. Frank swore under his breath and made off down the path. For a moment I thought he’d left me for good, but he wheeled round before he got to the old couple and swung his hand up to tear the cigarette from his lips. It was a strangely airless day, like being indoors, and the smoke hung between us almost still, though I could hear the wind in the pines far above our heads.