The Vanishing Woman Read online

  “That really is in awfully bad taste,” remarked Gabriel, but he suspected the martyr’s crown was never likely to be his. “I’m quite fit really for a man of my great age. When I was at the abbey, I walked to and from the village all the time. Getting back to the case in hand, Agnes was alone?”

  “Yes, she couldn’t possibly have risked Mother coming home to find Pamela in the house. She would have made very sure her guests had left in good time for her to clear up and put the house to rights before Mother’s return. I rather wish she hadn’t been alone now, an independent witness might have been able to make more sense of this.” They were walking along the path to the house now. Douglas gestured a little to his left. “That was where I found Agnes,” he explained, “or rather, she found me. I feel rather ashamed of myself; to be honest, I didn’t realise it was her grabbing hold of me and gave her rather a kick. I’m amazed I didn’t break her nose.”

  “You didn’t realise who it was?”

  “Father, I didn’t even realise it was a woman. I’m not sure what I thought had taken hold of me. I’m ashamed to say I panicked. You honestly don’t think I would have hurt her on purpose, do you?”

  Gabriel could see Agnes’ plaintive face staring at them from the kitchen window and quickened his pace. As they grew closer, the unfortunate incident of Saturday night became painfully obvious. Agnes’ face was quite badly bruised. “I’m sure it was an accident,” offered Gabriel. “Let us not get distracted from the real mystery here.”

  Agnes let them in wordlessly and moved automatically towards the kitchen so that she could make a pot of tea, but Douglas placed a hand gently on her arm and gestured for her to take Gabriel into the sitting room. “Don’t worry about tea, Aggie,” he said softly. “Why don’t you tell Father what’s happened and I’ll make the tea.”

  Agnes nodded and walked through the sitting-room door without looking back to see if Gabriel had followed. Even though Agnes and Douglas were his parishioners, Gabriel had never entered this house on a friendly call. Fr Foley had warned him against doing so due to Enid Jennings’ having lapsed in typically acrimonious style over a year before, thanks to some detail of parish politics too petty to be remembered now. Agnes and Gabriel entered a comfortable if claustrophobic room, the meeting place of a cottage that must have belonged to a farming family before the land had to be sold off and the cottage became merely an inconveniently placed dwelling for a family who preferred to live apart from the world. The walls were clad in wood panelling for the sake of keeping the heat in, and on them hung a number of pictures and mementos, including a mounted fox’s head, which the taxidermist had fashioned with a snarl as though the unfortunate creature’s final act towards his killers had been one of angry defiance.

  “Please sit down, Father,” said Agnes, gesturing towards a creaky old leather armchair, which Gabriel suspected was the most comfortable chair in the room. He waited a moment for her to sit down on the sofa before sitting down himself. “I’m so sorry to drag you out here. It’s just that I don’t really know who else to talk to, and I know the police think I’m crazy or making things up. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would say that Douglas thinks I’m a raving lunatic too, but he’s too polite to say so to my face.”

  “Agnes, I’m sure you’re not mad,” said Gabriel and he meant it. He knew that Agnes was very well respected at the school in spite of her tender years and that parents spoke highly of her skills. He doubted very much that a girl barely out of school herself would run quite such an orderly and successful class if she were not in full possession of her mental faculties. That said, he had not assured her that she was not troubled because mere observation made that quite obvious. “Now, why don’t you tell me exactly what happened? Don’t think about what I’m likely to make of the whole thing; just tell me in your own words exactly what you saw on Saturday afternoon. I’m sure there’s nothing we can’t puzzle out between us.”

  Agnes gave a nervous smile. She was a plain, dull-looking young woman with a thin, sunken face framed by wispy, mouse-coloured hair, but there was a vulnerability about her that made it very difficult not to warm to her immediately. “I hardly know how to start,” she said quickly, then closed her eyes as though she preferred to pretend he was not there. “I was just finishing the washing-up. Pamela and her little one had come for lunch, and I needed to have everything back in its proper place before Mother came home. She doesn’t like Pamela—well, that’s not very important at the moment. I was just finishing and had put the kettle on to make some tea when I noticed Mother in the distance.”

  “You were looking out of the kitchen window, I presume?” confirmed Gabriel. Agnes’ rapid, breathless way of talking made her quite difficult to understand at times, a problem vastly exaggerated by her recent injury, which forced her to breathe through her mouth. “What time was it?”

  Agnes was momentarily confused at being asked two questions one after the other. “Yes, I was looking out of the window, almost daydreaming really. As it happens, I looked at the clock because I suddenly noticed how dark it was outside and suspected it was later than I had thought. It was approaching four o’clock, a little later than I would have expected Mother back, but not much later. I tell you she was there; I could see her in the distance, walking along that path. You know the path I mean; you have walked that way yourself. I heard the kettle whistling and moved away to switch off the gas and make the tea. I was gone only a moment, but when I got back to the window she had disappeared.”

  Gabriel leaned back in his chair. He had no doubt at all that she was sincere; she certainly believed she had seen her mother there. “When you say you saw your mother coming up the path, can you be absolutely sure it was she? As you have said, it was already dusk, and she would have kept disappearing from view as she walked behind trees. Are you absolutely sure—”

  “Father, I have watched my mother walk up that path a thousand times!” she interrupted, with the beginnings of impatience. “Yes, of course it was growing dark, that’s what the policeman said, and she did keep going in and out of view as she walked past the trees, but she was never out of sight for more than a second. I thought I must have made some strange mistake at first, not because I really thought I could have seen her and not seen her—that doesn’t make any sense—but because she never came to the house. There is nowhere else she could have gone if not to the house, and if something terrible had happened to her on that stretch of ground, surely she would have been found by now. Her body, I mean.”

  “Indeed.” Gabriel noticed that as soon as Agnes had referred to a body, she had become deathly pale, and he suspected it was the first time it had occurred to her that her mother might be dead. “I assume the police have searched the area?”

  “Well, yes. Not very thoroughly, but there’s not very much to search. The woodlands are very sparse around here; there really aren’t many places she could be. I tried to search for her myself.”

  “Is that why Douglas found you on his way home?”

  Agnes’ eyes glistened and she nodded hastily, choking on the answer. She took a long breath in and out before attempting to speak further. “I didn’t know what to do. I was all alone in the house. I had no idea when Douglas would be back, and it was all so . . . so creepy. It felt like something out of a horror story. I knew I had seen her, but nobody disappears into thin air. When she didn’t come to the house, I think my imagination got the better of me; I thought that something must have happened. I guessed that she must have been taken ill and fainted. I would have seen her lying on the ground, but it was the only thing I could think of.” Agnes paused to catch her breath. “Now that I think about it, she was walking quite slowly. I rushed out of the house without even putting my coat on—I suppose I thought I would be only a minute—and then went to the place I thought I had last seen her.”

  Gabriel looked across at Agnes, but she had screwed her eyes up tight to restrain herself—a second too late—and tears had begun coursing down her face.
“Agnes, you must tell me everything. What did you see out there?”

  “Nothing,” she whimpered. “That was the trouble; I saw nothing. There was no sign of her at all, not a thing. I don’t know if there were even footprints. I wouldn’t have been able to see them in that light, and by the morning there had been all that rain. But she would have left some sign she had been there, and there was nothing. And then the strangest thing happened to me.”

  Gabriel heard the creak of the floorboards, turned around and noticed that Douglas was standing in the doorway, holding a tea tray, evidently trying to avoid interrupting Agnes. Gabriel signalled to him to sit down and pulled out of his pocket a clean handkerchief, which he handed to Agnes. He had lost many handkerchiefs over the years in such situations, but since they were an enduringly popular Christmas present for a celibate male, he never ran out. “It’s all right, Agnes. You are quite safe.”

  “I am more afraid of myself than you, Father,” she sobbed. “The thing is, I must be mad. I can’t explain what happened next at all. I really did feel as though I were possessed.”

  Gabriel could not help sitting up sharply at the word. He did not dare look at Douglas, whom he expected was clasping his head in vexation. “Possessed?”

  “It is the only word I can use; it was as though some dark force were descending upon me as I stood there. I thought I was going to be sick; I started shaking and weeping. It was freezing cold, but I was perspiring as though I were in the middle of the desert. I’ve never felt anything like it. I really thought I was going to die. I just collapsed. I think I may have fainted, because the next thing I knew, it was completely dark and I had no idea where I was.”

  “And that was when Douglas came along?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that would explain why you did not attempt to call out to him.”

  “I suppose that’s one mystery solved,” declared Douglas, slightly too acerbically. Agnes winced with shame. “You know, when I saw the blood on her hands, I thought for one terrible moment it was someone else’s.”

  “For pity’s sake, what sort of a person do you take me for?” cried Agnes, in a flash of temper that seemed out of character. “Did you honestly think I had killed someone?”

  Douglas raised his hands defensively. “I’m—I’m sorry, I really have no idea what I was thinking. Look—” It was his turn to look ashamed. “Look here, Father, I’m sorry. I’m not sure quite what got into me. During the war, I was captured on a night raid, and I’ve never been too keen on walking through undergrowth in the dark ever since. There was just something very spooky about that path after dark. When Agnes grabbed me, I lost my head. That’s all there is to it; I lost my head. I realised very quickly that the blood was hers.”

  Gabriel closed his eyes, considering what they had said. It was the sort of tantalising conundrum that would have excited him ordinarily, but he was sobered by the thought that a missing woman—however unpleasant—was at the heart of this and that whether or not Agnes and her brother had considered it, the likelihood was that Enid Jennings was dead. He remembered his old adversary Detective Inspector Applegate telling him once that, in his judgement, if a person was reported missing and there were no reasons to believe the person had disappeared of his own accord, there was a window of forty-eight hours in which the person might be found alive. After that, the police were looking for a dead body.

  “Agnes,” he said finally, standing up. “Why don’t you show me the place yourself? It would be useful to get the lie of the land in daylight anyway.”

  Agnes could not hide her reluctance. “Father, the police have already been round, I told you. It didn’t even take them very long; they just shuffled about for an hour or so. In fact, with a pair of binoculars, you could probably see if anything were amiss without even coming down the hill. They haven’t found her; they haven’t found any sign of a—a—”

  “Grave?” Douglas put in.

  “I was going to say ‘struggle’,” she responded with a faint tone of accusation.

  “Sorry. Why not take a look? We can have the tea afterwards. It shan’t get cold.”

  Gabriel had, of course, walked this way in daylight quite recently, but he realised just how preoccupied he had been with worrying about the reception he might receive to notice anything important. Now, he employed his keenest powers of observation, mentally noting any detail he thought might be relevant. As Agnes had pointed out, the bad weather had blotted out any sign of footprints, but he doubted there would have been very much to go on anyway. The area had been badly affected by the recent flooding, and the ground still felt tacky and unstable from having been waterlogged, like the surface of a vast, dirty sponge. “The house was not flooded?” asked Gabriel absently. “It doesn’t look as though your house suffered damage from those terrible floods.”

  “What has that to do with anything?” demanded Douglas, with the irritability of a man whose precious time is being wasted. “The floodwaters cleared weeks ago.” He looked at Gabriel to see if he was satisfied with the answer, which he clearly was not. “Well, as a matter of fact, we got away quite lightly. There haven’t been floods like that in this area since long before my mother was born. The land is low-lying, but we’re quite some distance from the river. Mother always said that if floods ever did come, though, our house might suffer, so she bought a whole lot of sandbags from the barracks. After the war there wasn’t very much call for them, thank goodness; they must have practically given them to her. When Mother got word that the floodwaters were coming our way, she got Agnes and me to stack dozens of the things up against the door and the windows. When the water started pouring down that hill, she even got us to barricade in the door from the inside so that there were two walls of sandbags to protect us. The area around the door needed a lick of paint afterwards, but she was right. The house didn’t flood.”

  “She was certainly a practical woman,” commented Gabriel and bit his tongue. “I mean is. She showed a great deal of forethought.”

  “We’d certainly have been flooded, but in fact the waters did not come up very high in the end. It is not easy to see from down here, but the ground undulates quite a bit. The house is some inches above where we stand now.”

  “This was where I saw her,” said Agnes, as though trying to remind the two men of why they were there. “That was where I lost sight of her.”

  She was standing facing the house, the dead, hollow tree directly to her left. “You’re absolutely sure that was where she was standing?” asked Gabriel.

  “Yes, because I could see that tree from the window. You can see that it looks different from the others.”

  Gabriel moved over to where she was standing and took a closer look at the tree. It was more than just hollow, it was practically a shell of a tree. But though there might be space for a person to hide himself in it, there was no obvious place for him to go from there other than back onto the path, where he would be in full view of the kitchen window. He got down on his knees and examined the ground in and around the tree and then stood up and looked at the path and the marshy grass on either side.

  “What were you trying to see in there?” enquired Douglas, pointing at the hollow tree Gabriel had just left alone. “A secret trapdoor? I think you’ll find none of the stones on that path will come loose either.”

  “That was not at all what I was looking for,” Gabriel retorted. “We are very far from the realms of a children’s adventure story, I’m afraid. That’s a point—” He suddenly realised what was disturbing him so much. It was just too deserted there, too silent. The rest of the town was really no distance from the spot; within minutes, any fit man at a brisk walk could reach the nearest house, and yet the place felt so much more isolated than it really was, so dead. “This is common land, isn’t it?” he asked. “Anyone can come here.”

  “Yes,” said Agnes, “the cottage was a farmhouse once; all the surrounding land would have belonged to it, though I don’t suppose it was terribly easy t
o farm. It’s pretty gloomy down here even in warm weather. We own about half an acre, but it’s all round the other side. From here to the town, I suppose it belongs to the people of the town. Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering why one never sees any children playing here, for example. On the rare occasions I strike out into the countryside from the other side of the town, I quite often see little groups of children running around, having picnics, climbing trees. That sort of thing. Not much for them to do in town, so they run wild. But not around here.”

  Agnes laughed. It was the first time Gabriel had ever heard her laugh, and he felt a little sheepish at being the cause of it. “What self-respecting urchin is going to play under the watchful gaze of the town’s dreaded schoolmistress?” she asked, not unreasonably. “In any case, there’s an old rumour that the place is haunted.”

  “Nonsense, of course,” Douglas cut in, in a tone that would have been pompous in an older man. “Just little-town superstition, as usual. There is an old story that a man hanged himself here many years ago. The story goes that he violated and murdered a child. The people of the town found out who he was and would have lynched him, so he hanged himself, apparently from that very tree.”

  “When is that supposed to have happened?”

  “It never happened, Father; it’s a fanciful story. There is no record of any man committing suicide in this area or of any child being abducted and killed like that. Not for the past hundred years at least. As I said, it’s nonsense. My mother’s presence was frightening enough for children without having to scare them away with ghost stories. Even we never played out here.”

  Then where did you play, Douglas? thought Gabriel, as they walked back to the house and the promise of tea and biscuits. What sort of childhood did the two of you have in this dank, moated grange of a home?