The Vanishing Woman Read online

  “Father, I didn’t kill her,” she said tonelessly. “I didn’t do it, though—God forgive me—I’d sooner put a medal than a noose around the neck of the person who did.”

  “Pamela, please don’t”

  “I had nothing to do with it, Father. Hear my confession and ask me under the seal, and I will give you the same answer. But I did want to kill her when I realised she knew about Scottie, though I have no idea how she can have worked it out. No one has ever questioned the situation. I was going to do it, Father. I couldn’t bear her to hurt that child.”

  “Would you like to tell me what really happened?”

  Pamela pulled a crisp linen handkerchief out of her pocket and scrunched it in her hand as though aware that she would need it. “Why do you need to hear it from me? You evidently know she’s not mine.”

  “I guessed, that’s all, and don’t imagine anyone else will. She looks exactly like your child; the resemblance is striking. But there were things that struck me as a little odd, shall we say. If you’ll forgive my being indelicate, you are clearly—well, pure.”

  Pamela blushed immediately. “How can you—how?” she blustered. “How can you possibly know a thing like that?”

  “There you see, you blush very easily for a woman of the world,” he answered, gently. “You blushed when I asked if George Smithson were Scottie’s father, and it was not just because I had misunderstood the nature of your friendship. Then there’s your relationship with Scottie herself.”

  “I’m a perfectly good mother,” Pamela interrupted, the familiar terse tone breaking through her confusion. “She means everything to me.”

  “But of course. Don’t misunderstand me. You truly are one of the most loving, most devoted mothers I have ever been honoured to meet. But there are times when the two of you look a little more like companions than mother and daughter, more the way I would expect a grown woman to treat a very much younger sister.”

  Pamela regarded him quietly. “Do you know something?” she asked finally. “You’re like a child, Father. You suspect nothing and notice everything.”

  Gabriel pulled his purple stole out of his pocket. “Would you like me to hear your confession?” he asked. “You may find it easier this way.”

  Pamela nodded, but the sight of him draping the stole around his neck had the unfortunate effect of causing her to burst into tears. “Don’t!” she begged. “Let me talk to you first. I swear I will tell you everything.”

  “Then why not make a clean breast of it, Pamela?”

  “Because I’m not sure I am as sorry as I ought to be yet, and I know I will use the seal to stop you talking.”

  “Very well,” answered Gabriel, folding the stole again and leaving it in his lap. “That’s honest at least. Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “It’s hard,” she began, but she sounded so exhausted that Gabriel found himself straining to hear. “I have—I have lied to so many people, most importantly to an innocent child who had a right to know the truth. I am not her mother, but she believes that I am.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believed it was better for her to grow up thinking herself illegitimate than an orphan. I meant to tell her, truly; I was going to tell her when she was older. I was not lying when I said that her father died during the war. She is my brother Charlie’s child, but you knew that.”

  “Well, it took very little deduction once I had realised she was not yours to assume she was the child of your twin. And it seemed reasonable that she might have been called Charlotte in honour of a father called Charles, but also explained why you did not like her to be called Charlie. A little too close to the bone perhaps?”

  “Yes.”

  “What can have possessed you to do this to her?”

  “I’m afraid it all rather crept up on me, as lies so often do.” She stared directly into the flames, ignoring the sight of Gabriel leaning silently towards her, scrutinising her every word. “Charlie married Bernie the year before the war broke out. Scottie was born two weeks after he left with his regiment for the Far East. He never saw her. They had moved back to Edinburgh to be closer to Bernie’s family before it was publicly known that she was pregnant, but even her family were not able to help in the end. For months, none of us knew if Charlie were alive or dead, but eventually Bernie received a card from a fellow soldier, telling her he had died in captivity.”

  Gabriel’s eyes were drawn to Charlie’s photograph. “I’m so sorry, Pamela,” he said, hating the lameness of it. He thought of the millions of families around the world who had received news like that, of the many wistful, monochrome faces staring down at loved ones in silent, undefined reproach. All those young dead faces . . . “I am so sorry, Pamela. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a twin.”

  “It was harder for Bernie, and Scottie still so little. The poor thing was mad with grief, and no one knew how best to help her. I was still reeling from the news myself when I received a telegram from Bernie’s parents telling me that she had thrown herself in front of a train. They were beside themselves, and there was this poor little mite without parents, and they were in no condition to care for her.” Pamela turned to Gabriel imploringly. “It did not start out as a lie, you must believe me. I agreed to take care of her; that was all. I became her legal guardian. But of course, people talked. No one was prepared to believe that a young, unmarried woman would have adopted a child. We had the same surname, of course, and the resemblance was so strong that naturally people thought she was mine.”

  “So you decided to pretend that she was.”

  “Yes. It’s absurd really; I would never have given my body to any man. I am fond of breaking the rules, but there are some lines I could never cross. If it hadn’t all been so painful, the irony would have been glorious.”

  “Pamela . . .”

  “Well it would!” she insisted, impatiently wiping away tears. “A friend of mine had to hide the bastard child she lost to keep up the pretence at respectability. I hid the fact that I had never been anywhere near a man, never given birth, even though it meant being denounced as a whore. Old biddies used to spit at me on my way out of church, and I used to hold my head high and laugh at them. I’m afraid I rather enjoyed being a rebel, Father.”

  “Evidently.”

  Pamela had rediscovered some of her customary energy in telling the story, and she looked sidelong at Gabriel. “Are you suitably disgusted, Father?”

  “Not at all,” answered Gabriel truthfully, without returning her glance, “but now that you have stopped lying to me, perhaps you had better stop lying to yourself.”

  “Father—”

  “I do not believe for a single second that a woman of your considerable intellect and common sense would have given up her good name and lied so cruelly to a child simply to confirm the prejudices of nasty old gossips. I think this runs much deeper than that.”

  Pamela gave a vexed sigh. “I’m sorry, Father, but I have been honest with you when it gave me no pleasure to do so. What on earth are you driving at?”

  “How did your brother die?”

  “He died, Father,” she answered, a little too hastily, but she seemed to know she was heading for a trap and had no intention of stepping into it. “That’s all you need to know. Millions died; my brother had the misfortune to be one of them.”

  “Pamela . . .”

  “Oh, don’t ‘Pamela’ me! He died in a Jap POW camp. You must have some idea that he did not meet a peaceful end. Bernie’s parents showed me the message. It simply said that he had died.”

  “You were his twin, Pamela. I don’t imagine you required a message to tell you your brother had died. I suspect you already knew and perhaps had even worked out how he had died. Am I correct?”

  Pamela looked fixedly into the fire, but even with her face pointing away from him, Gabriel could see that she was ashen. “Yes,” she said dejectedly. “I knew he was dead. The peculiar thing was that I found out about his dea
th shortly after being discharged from hospital. I was driving ambulances at the time, and one day I collapsed in agony. No explanation, no warning. I suddenly found myself on the ground, writhing around with the most terrible stabbing pains I had ever experienced. They thought it was a burst appendix at first and rushed me to hospital, but it wasn’t. The doctors came to the conclusion that it might be a weak heart. The pain was everywhere, you see, most severely in my chest. Of course, I knew it wasn’t my heart, but how was I to tell the doctors I had felt my brother being murdered? It sounded too mad.”

  “It’s not unheard of, the connection between twins—” but Gabriel was silenced by the sight of Pamela’s trembling shoulders. “I’m so sorry, my dear. I’m so sorry, but living your brother’s life for him will never bring him back.”

  “One of the survivors told me what had happened!” Pamela burst out, but her voice cracked with the strain of speaking, and she battled with every word. “He told me he was in the camp—he was there with Charlie. He—he knew him. Charlie and some others tried to escape, but—well, there was nowhere for them to go. It was so—so stupid; they could never have reached safety!”

  “Pamela, be careful,” Gabriel interrupted, tapping the back of her hand as though to wake her up, but she was struggling to breathe, and he was afraid she might faint. “Calm yourself.”

  “When Charlie and the others were captured, they were tied to stakes in front of everyone—everyone—” She was speaking so quickly that the words tumbled into one another and were obscured even further by the sound of her gasps for breath. “The whole camp had to watch—then they were bayoneted to death. I can—I can still feel it—I can feel it sometimes. And Scottie is so like him. You’ve no idea; she’s so very, very like him. His smile, even his mannerisms. When they asked me to care for her, I felt as though he had given her to me himself.”

  Gabriel sat in excruciating silence as Pamela rested her head on the arm of her chair and wept uncontrollably. He knew that there was nothing he could say that she would even hear in the state she was in, so he simply waited, resting his hand on her head as she drifted about in her own grief. She slowly began to quiet down. Her breathing became deeper and less laboured; Gabriel heard the telltale gulps and sobs as raw emotions were overcome by exhaustion. “It’s all right, Pamela,” he said, stepping back to allow her the space to sit up. “It’s all right now.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, refusing to raise her head. “I’m sorry about all of it.”

  “It’s all right, Pamela,” he said, a little more firmly, “but I think you must listen to me now. You are an excellent mother to Scottie, and she loves you, but she has a right to know who she is. Telling her the truth will not make any difference to her feelings for you. She will always know you as her mother, and one day she will appreciate the sacrifices you have made for her.”

  Pamela slowly raised her head. Her face was so red and swollen that she was barely recognisable as the impish young woman he had watched commanding the attention of a lecture hall so recently. “Father, there were no sacrifices on my part at all,” she said with absolute sincerity. “I am obsessed with memory; I have made it my life’s work to study the way writers remember. Having a living embodiment of my brother’s memory at my side could never be a sacrifice.”

  Gabriel was suddenly aware of a scuffle going on outside the door; then an ear-splitting thud as the door flew open and George Smithson stormed into the room, closely followed by a protesting Marion. “I don’t care if she is not to be disturbed!” George snapped over his shoulder before staggering to a halt in the centre of the room. He stared at the pair of them. “What the devil’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry, Madam,” Marion put in from the back of the room. “I told him not to come in. I thought Father was hearing your confession.”

  Gabriel stood up quickly. “It’s quite all right, Marion. Dr Milton and I were just having a little chat. I’ll be leaving now.” He turned to Pamela, but George had already taken Gabriel’s place by the fire and was holding Pamela resolutely by the hand. “Confession may have to wait for another day.”

  “Just a moment,” George demanded to Gabriel’s retreating back. “What’s happened here? What have you done?”

  “I came only to apologise,” Gabriel began, turning around sheepishly.

  “Well, you have made rather a dog’s breakfast of that, haven’t you?” answered George tartly. “Now I think you had better leave.”

  Gabriel smiled awkwardly and shuffled in the direction of the door, only to hear Pamela calling him to stop. “Father? Wait a moment.” He turned to face her and noticed with some satisfaction that George had his arm around Pamela’s shoulder. “Please don’t tell a soul about this. I will tell Scottie. I think I should be the one to tell her.”

  Gabriel inclined his head. “Of course, Pamela. It is entirely right that you should. Now it seems to me that you two have a lot to tell one another.” With that, he left the room, pausing in the hall just long enough to hear Pamela say to George, “I have something to tell you” and the response, “That’s funny, me too.” A moment later, Marion had closed the door and was helping Gabriel on with his coat. He hoped as he left that neither of them would realise he had set them both up to have this conversation, at least until after their secrets had emerged.

  15

  Gabriel took the long route from the Milton house to his next port of call, partly because he needed to straighten his thoughts but mostly because a yawning feeling of anxiety had taken hold of him again. No, it was not anxiety as such, though it felt a little like fear. He was feeling sad but also a sense of guilt that his sadness was misplaced in some way. A woman had died an unexpected death, frightened and alone, leaving this world in precisely the way Gabriel prayed every night that he would not leave it himself, and yet he felt so little pity for her. He knew that he had been remiss in failing to pray for her soul, but he had been overwhelmed from the start by the nagging apprehension that Enid Jennings had died with more wickedness to account for than he could know and that she had died without feeling a moment’s remorse. But even if he had not known the full extent of Enid Jennings’ crimes, someone who lived and breathed did know and had acted on the impulse to settle the score. Gabriel could never have explained this to Inspector Applegate, but he was desperate to find out the truth of what had happened on that lonely path and to meet the person responsible, because the culprit lived and might still be saved.

  Gabriel became aware of an odd, uneven clip-clop growing louder, and he glanced up in confusion, half expecting to see a small lame donkey careering in his direction. Instead, a very red-faced, out-of-puff Mr Blewett limped frenetically in his direction, the metal caps of his old service boots tapping erratically on the paving stones as he hurried towards the priest. “Father!” he wheezed, snatching off his hat as he drew close enough. Mr Blewett came to a halt, panting like a marathon runner, his wiry, tweed-clad frame swaying alarmingly as he battled to catch his breath.

  “My dear chap, what on earth is the matter?” demanded Gabriel, stepping towards him to take his arm. “What were you thinking, dashing about like that at your age? You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

  “I’m not a day over seventy!” wheezed Mr Blewett, using the sleeve of his jacket to wipe away the sweat that was gathering at his temples. “I saw you in the distance, and I had to catch you in time. I thought I was sure to be murdered if I forgot to pass on the information. Isn’t that what always happens?”

  “What?” Gabriel always battled to avoid an existential crisis during his conversations with members of the older generation, but this time he had no idea what the man was talking about. “Why would you be murdered?”

  “Because I saw her! I saw the killer!”

  Gabriel felt a small explosion of panic resonating through his chest. He looked round to see if anyone were within earshot, but they were alone. “What do you mean, Mr Blewett? Do you mean Mrs Jennings’ killer?”

  M
r Blewett nodded. “That was why you wanted to know who was leaving flowers at that grave, wasn’t it? I thought as much as soon as you asked me. That priest is searching for a murderer, and he knows the killer is the one who leaves flowers. It’s a signal. I read a Penny Dreadful once where a murderer did that.”

  “Mr Blewett—”

  “He always left a bunch of irises at a tombstone in a deserted graveyard as a warning he was about to strike. There would be some significance in the choice of grave—a young woman who had died in childbirth, and so the victim would be a young mother; a five-year-old, and the next victim would be a little child—”

  “No, no! You are quite mistaken!” Gabriel said emphatically. “I am so sorry, Mr Blewett. I’m afraid we were talking at cross purposes. I wanted to know who was being so kind as to lay flowers at Mrs Olson’s grave because I wanted to thank the person. It has nothing to do with poor Mrs Jennings, God rest her soul.”

  Mr Blewett replaced his hat with an air of evident displeasure. “Well really, you might have said something. I very nearly confronted the lass meself.”

  “Lass?”

  “Yes, pretty little thing. Surprised I didn’t notice her before.” Mr Blewett responded to Gabriel’s frown with a satisfied smile, knowing he had given an answer the priest had not expected. “Now I think about it, she hardly looked like a Jack the Ripper.”

  “Who is she?”

  “You know the girl I mean. Lots of blonde hair, goes about with a nipper in a pram. The doctor’s daughter.”

  Gabriel sensed that Mr Blewett was watching his every move and endeavoured to smile. “Well now, isn’t that kind? A young woman busy with a little one still finds the time for an act of mercy. How kind!”

  “Indeed. I shouldn’t mind snuffing it meself if I had an angel like that praying for me. Good day to you, Father.”

  Gabriel waited until Mr Blewett had walked four or five yards before letting the smile slide off his face. Oh Therese, what have you done? he thought, forcing himself to put one foot in front of the other. He had not been lying when he had told Mr Blewett that the identity of the mysterious benefactor had nothing to do with Mrs Jennings. He had believed what he had said, or at least wanted to. Even in the midst of a nightmare such as a disappearance and death, a lonely grave is usually simply a lonely grave. It still was, just someone else’s grave.