The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (16 page)

‘We were only five or ten minutes late,’ Frances said. ‘I’m sure they would have waited.’

Eleanor turned around. ‘It’s not like David to be late,’ she said, ‘unless they’ve got lost.’

‘There was probably just a misunderstanding,’ Laurence said. ‘And, frankly, it looks clear on the plan but it’s hellish hard to get through the crush.’

He pulled out his watch. It was nearly half an hour after they were supposed to rendezvous. He tried to hide the first stirrings of alarm.

Eleanor said, ‘David lived in London for a while, so he’s not going to be troubled by crowds.’ It sounded more like a question than a statement. ‘I just hope he and Maggie are keeping a tight hold on to Nicky. He can be an awful dawdler, especially if he sees something that takes his eye. Although an Egyptian mummy should be quite an attraction.’ She gave an uncertain smile.

Frances, who seemed more obviously anxious than Eleanor, kept looking back to the queue. ‘Shall I just make sure they’re not at the far end?’ she said.

Laurence watched her follow the line back round the building and out of sight. Eleanor gave a big sigh.

‘By the time they get here, we’ll be queuing until nightfall.’ Her eyes were flickering away from him. ‘I just wish they’d get a move on.’

Frances was returning. ‘No sign,’ she said from a few yards away and bit her lip.

Behind her, Laurence saw Patrick appear but he was alone.

Eleanor, who had seen him too, said, ‘Well, that was a bit of a long shot,’ even before Patrick reached them. ‘I didn’t really think David would have taken them up to the Doll’s House,’ she said, brightly and fast. And I think there would have been protests from my son.’

Laurence had a feeling she was trying to soothe Frances.

‘Do you think we should get in the queue?’ Eleanor said, turning to Patrick. ‘So that we’re ready to go when the children turn up?’ Her words were tumbling over each other.

A group of young men and girls came out. As they passed, laughing, one man said in a strong London accent, ‘It’s not real, silly. The real stuff is locked up—it’s worth a fortune. King Tut’s still in India or somewhere.’

‘You’ll be laughing on the other side of your fat face, Stanley, if the mummy’s curse does for you,’ said one of the girls. One of the men laughed and another girl cuffed him on the arm.

‘Everybody’s dead who dug it up, any rate,’ the first girl said. ‘Everybody. The pharaoh might not like us all gawking at his things. We wouldn’t like it if they went and dug up our Queen Vic. It’s rude.’

They moved on noisily. Even Frances looked amused briefly. Then Laurence turned around and saw Julian, looking hot and pushing his way towards them. The others hadn’t turned round yet but he caught Laurence’s eye and shook his head. As he reached them, Frances turned and saw him. Her face drained of colour.

‘What’s happened?’ she said, putting her hand on Julian’s arm. Julian looked cross rather than worried.

‘I don’t understand it. David’s been an utter fool. He was at the car. Said he brought the children round the perimeter because of the crowds, left them at the eastern gate, from where he says you can clearly see this spot, and pointed out to Maggie where they should wait.’

Eleanor’s alarm was almost tangible. ‘Why didn’t he stay with them?’ she asked. ‘What on earth was he thinking?’

‘He had some damn fool idea—sorry, Eleanor—that there were some unsavoury types eyeing up the car.’

Patrick looked exasperated. ‘I thought he was supposed to be so reliable,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘Where’s David now? ‘ Laurence said.

‘I left him back at the car. It’s possible that if Maggie and Nicholas got lost, Maggie might have the wit to get back to the motor park.’ His tone of voice suggested that he doubted this and it certainly didn’t seem to reassure Eleanor, who was scanning passers-by as if she might see Nicholas at any minute.

‘They must be set up for this here.’ Laurence found he was loath to say ‘lost children’. ‘Children must get parted from their parents all the time. They’re not just going to disappear.’

‘Maggie’s a sensible girl,’ Patrick said, his eyes fixed on Eleanor.

‘But she’s scarcely been out of the village—Marlborough would seem like a busy metropolis to her, Swindon like a city. There must be thousands of people here. Hundreds of thousands.’

A note of panic was entering Eleanor’s voice and for a few moments they all stood, uncertain what to do.

Eventually Laurence said, ‘I suggest somebody stay here with Eleanor, in case they simply turn up. One of us can go and find out what they do about children who’ve wandered off.’

He thought it might be a mistake to leave Frances with Eleanor as her own anxiety was so palpable.

‘Patrick, why don’t you stay with Eleanor?’

Patrick was sweating lightly, although he, of all of them, should be used to the heat. It occurred to Laurence that Patrick’s weak heart, so easily forgotten when Patrick was on form, made him the least suitable for racing all over Wembley.

‘If Julian doesn’t mind going off to speak to a policeman, simply so that they can keep an eye open?’

As he said this, Laurence looked at Julian, who said, ‘Of course.’ Julian pulled out his watch. ‘Perhaps we could all rendezvous here in half an hour?’ He looked first at Laurence, then at Eleanor, who said nothing but nodded slowly. Julian nodded once and strode off, against the flow of people.

‘Meanwhile, Frances and I could stay together and go round the area between the eastern gate and here. It’s not impossible that somebody will have spotted them,’ Laurence continued. ‘What’s obviously happened is that they missed this exhibit, or even thought the queues were too long, or simply got lost.’

‘Especially as we were late,’ Eleanor said. Frances blinked a few times, apparently bewildered.

Eleanor added, ‘Perhaps Maggie’s lack of familiarity with cities might be just why she felt safe to go off, with no idea of how confusing it might be.’

‘Maybe they decided to fill in time by looking at the beach or having a ride on a roundabout?’ Patrick said.

Just as Laurence was about to speak, he saw the young woman who had been selling tickets for King Tut’s Treasures leave the booth and an older man take her place. They had tricked up the girl to look Egyptian with dark lines around her eyes and a heavy black wig, which she was scratching underneath with a finger. Before she could walk away Laurence went up to her.

‘Excuse me.’

She looked wary and stepped back; her hand dropped away from the crooked wig, exposing a very fair hairline.

‘I was just wondering if you’d seen someone I’m looking for.’ She gestured towards the booth. ‘Not bleeding likely. I bin in that steaming box all morning.’

‘I just thought you might have seen two children—well, a small boy and a girl of fifteen. They might have been waiting to come into your show.’

She made an incredulous face. ‘There’s lots of kiddies, all day. They all looks the same by dinnertime. And they’ll all be nicking stuff if you don’t keep an eye out.’

He turned back to Eleanor, shaking his head.

‘Where do you think they might have gone first, if they didn’t stop here?’ he said.

Eleanor raised her eyebrows. ‘The beach, I suppose. That’s where Nicky would have headed.’

It seemed to Laurence that she was struggling to maintain her composure now.

‘I can’t think of anything worse myself.’ She sighed. ‘Maggie was keen to see the beauties of the world or whatever they’re called, but I hope she would have thought twice about taking Nicky there.’

‘Right. Frances and I will brave the beach. We’ll return in twenty minutes, no more, by which time I hope the two of them will be back with you.’

Eleanor gave a rueful smile and leaned back against the slatted wall of a booth, as if exhausted.

‘Shall I get us a lemonade apiece?’ Patrick said. She only nodded. Although her smile was determined, her shoulders were slumped. Laurence and Frances set off, Laurence with some relief at doing something.

‘He can’t swim,’ Eleanor called after them just as they were about to go out of earshot and this time Laurence could clearly hear a tremble in her voice.

Frances was tense and alert. Despite the day’s warmth, she had wrapped her arms around herself while they were talking. Now she walked on without saying a word.

Out of the corner of his eye Laurence saw that the fellow who had talked to him by the roundabout was now manning his own ride. It seemed popular, although it was neither as huge nor as spectacular as some others: just eight or ten great fat cockerels on gilded poles, rising and falling jerkily.

He nodded to the man who didn’t seem to see him; his eyes appeared fixed as he studied passers-by. Thousands of strangers must go by every week.

As they passed the little terminus of the miniature train, the man shouted out from behind them, ‘Roll up, roll up. Kiddies go free with their mums or nanas. Cock-a-Hoop. Only ride like it in England.’

He must have pressed some kind of button because suddenly an ear-splitting metallic cockcrow screeched out. Laurence’s heart raced and he almost ducked. It had been six years, yet noises like that still meant danger.

Only now, as they turned left towards the beach, did Frances speak again.

‘You do think we’ll find them?’ she said.

‘I’m sure we will,’ he said and he believed it. ‘I know it’s difficult. But between us we’ll find them.’

‘Maggie’s nearly grown up but she’s very young for her age,’ Frances said. ‘And Nicky’s only a little boy. He couldn’t look after himself for very long.’

‘Well, for one thing he’s got Maggie, so he’s not on his own and, do you know, I think any son of Eleanor’s would probably be able to give quite a good account of himself.’

When she didn’t respond he added, carefully, ‘It’s nothing like what happened to Kitty. She disappeared from her own bed.’

She stared down at her feet and for a minute he thought he might have misjudged the origin of her anxiety but then she looked sideways at him.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Eleanor always said you were perceptive about people. I just couldn’t bear to see Eleanor go through what Lydia went through. Even if it was only for a day. And Nicky’s only a year older than Kitty was.’

To Laurence the beach was depressing as much in its attempts to be sea-like as in its surroundings. On the other side of the exhibition’s perimeter fence lay a vast landscape of mud and crushed rubble. Pegs and intersecting lines for positioning future houses and roads covered acres of what must once have been fields. London was swelling even as he watched. Dark-clothed men swarmed over the ground, carrying materials or knocking in staves. Across this huge building site a section was already covered with rows of small, identical houses, faintly Tudor in style with black-and-white timbering. A handful of nearer ones, more finished than the rest, had leaded windows and hanging pantiles. The half-dozen lines of building works stretched almost as far as the eye could see into a shallow declivity, then disappeared over the top, with the roof of the exhibition railway station just visible to his left. There was no sign of anything green and growing.

Almost as unreal was the huge curved stretch of sand in front of him. How would they ever clear it up, he wondered. Artificial coves had been constructed. Deckchairs sagged with the freight of grandmothers and spinster aunts. Men with their jackets off and rolled-up sleeves led small daughters, their dresses tucked into their bloomers, towards the water. Some children had come better prepared and were already wet, standing in the shallow and slightly murky water, their woollen swimming costumes sagging on their skinny frames. The bodies of both adults and children were so white, so unused to sunlight, he thought. All the time his eyes ranged back and forth, hovering for a minute over any girl of Maggie’s size and age and every small boy.

A man trudged up and down the sands, leading a donkey by a halter, two little girls in pinafores sitting impassive on its back. The donkey man’s other arm was absent, his sleeve pinned neatly to his chest. On the far side of the donkey track, between the beach and the sea, was a low cement wall, making the beach look more like the nearby Grand Union Canal than a south-coast resort. But there was laughter and excitable shouting, boys running about and being told off. Cooling down in the water was obviously so attractive on a hot day that adults were standing in it, fully clothed but having removed just their stockings or socks.

Laurence walked behind a young couple with their arms around each other and a child beside them. He turned to look at the small dark-haired boy, just as the child lifted his face to his parents and asked, ‘Is it like the real sea, Mam? Is the real sea this big?’

‘I think so,’ said the mother, plump and pink faced, herself scarcely older than a schoolgirl. ‘Bigger, even. Mebbe.’

When he reached the end of the long stretch of sand, Laurence retraced his steps, again scanning the crowds. He already sensed that neither Maggie nor Nicholas was here and he could see Frances, walking slowly towards him from the other end. She shook her head as she did so.

‘It was never very likely,’ he said. ‘Let’s give the sea monsters a quick look.’

As they walked towards the rest of the amusements, they paused on the edge of a group of excited cross-legged children and a row of women in deckchairs in front of a Punch and Judy show. A couple of men in collarless shirts and braces were watching, grinning. Punch was thumping Judy and the baby with a stick.

‘The bobby’ll come and nick you,’ a boy shouted. ‘See if he don’t.’

‘Shhhh,’ said several of the women.

They continued walking between further amusements. Laurence was startled when a band struck up, playing ‘The Soldiers of our Queen’. The bandstand was out of sight but obviously close at hand. Hoping to avoid the crowd immediately around it—he didn’t think either Maggie or Nicholas would linger to listen to a band—he indicated a narrower side path to Frances. Behind the front line of huts and tents, it was less easy to navigate. Laurence took Frances’s hand and guided them out between two striped tents. He was back at the fortune-teller. Two girls came out, their expressions worried.