The Vanishing Woman Read online

  5

  That evening, Gabriel was walking up the high street after a house call when he noticed that the lights were still on in Douglas Jennings’ office. He suspected that the poor man was staying on late to catch up with the work he had missed that morning and should probably not be disturbed, but Gabriel had been puzzling over the events of the weekend for much of the day. The urge to find out if there had been any further developments was irresistible.

  Douglas let Gabriel into the office, the secretary having long gone home, and as they climbed the stairs Gabriel could not help noticing the smell of alcohol and the unsteady gait Douglas was attempting to hide. “I see you have not been in the office all evening,” Gabriel commented, when they reached the top of the stairs. “Should you really be working under the influence?”

  “I’m not a High Court judge, Father,” snapped Douglas, with the petulance of a schoolboy caught with his hand in the sweetie jar. He showed Gabriel into his office. “If you must know, I popped out earlier for ten minutes to fortify myself. I’m not in the habit of drinking on the job, and I would appreciate it if you could keep this to yourself.”

  “How is Agnes?”

  “The same as when you saw her last, I suppose.” He sat down heavily at his desk and discreetly turned over some papers. “I left for work not long after you left. I have to get on with things somehow, but I oughtn’t to leave her alone in that house really. There could be a murderer on the loose, for all we know.”

  “Is it your belief that your mother has been murdered?” asked Gabriel. “I take it the police have not found anything yet.”

  “They’ve not found her, if that’s what you mean.” Douglas gave an apologetic sigh and dropped his head into his hands. Gabriel doubted he had had a wink of sleep in two nights. “I’m sorry, Father. I’m not a criminal lawyer by training, but I do know something of the way these cases pan out. If she were alive, she would have been in touch by now. Whatever else she was, she was not unreasonable like that. If she had taken it upon herself to walk away, she would at least have let us know.”

  “You don’t believe Agnes’ story, do you? You made it rather too obvious this morning.”

  Douglas opened a drawer and pulled out a silver cigarette case, which he offered to Gabriel. Gabriel declined. “Well, what do you think? The ghost of a hanged child murderer snatched my mother from Agnes’ sight? I’d credit you with a little more sense than that.”

  Gabriel shrugged, feeling a little as though he were in the witness box. It may have been the environment that brought out Douglas’ legalistic side, but he struggled not to be unsettled by it. “I take my lead from Aquinas on that one,” he said quietly. “Agnes has made a statement, a statement that by all accounts and purposes is impossible. There are three obvious possibilities: she is a liar making up a story for who knows what reason; she is mad, imagining a scenario in her disordered mind; thirdly, if she is neither a liar nor a lunatic, it seems to me that we must assume she is telling the truth. The bigger question may be how her story could be true.”

  “That’s all very well, Father,” Douglas protested, lighting up a cigarette with undue agitation, “but people simply do not disappear. It is perfectly possible she was mistaken. The light was poor—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, we have been over that possibility. She is, however, very certain that she saw her mother, and, even in poor light, it is hard to see how she could have failed to notice the presence of a human being at that distance—or failed to notice the absence of one, if you prefer.”

  “The police think she’s mad.”

  “Has she ever shown any signs of being out of her mind?”

  Douglas remained poker-faced, as he would have done in court, but he seemed to realise he was on dangerous ground and busied himself putting the cigarette case away. “Not entirely, but—no, mad is a little strong. A bit away with the fairies sometimes, it must be said, and rather nervy, but it was difficult not to grow up a bundle of nerves in our house. There’s quite a difference between that and being crazy enough to think one has seen a person who could not have been there.”

  “Has Agnes ever knowingly lied then? That is a much stronger possibility, if you’ll forgive my asking the question.”

  Douglas went very quiet, always a hopeful sign in Gabriel’s opinion that the truth was about to come out. “I hope you don’t think me rude, Father, but I’m really not sure this is any of your business.”

  Gabriel looked fixedly at him. “If none of this is my business, then why did you invite me to your house this morning? It is quite obvious to me that neither of you has much love for your mother, and I suspect she never gave you any reason. Nevertheless, she has a right to justice, and she will never get that if we cannot work out what happened to her in the first place.”

  “You are not the police, Father.”

  “Precisely, but it is just possible that the police already believe Agnes is involved with all this. They clearly do not believe her story any more than you do, which is hardly a good starting point in a police investigation. If they believe her to be a false witness, it is only a small step to viewing her as a suspect. If Agnes has ever told tall stories before, I think this would be the time to admit it.”

  Douglas took out another cigarette and used the dwindling stub of the first to light it. Gabriel detested the smell of cigarette smoke, but he saw that acrid, dirty little curl of smoke slowly polluting the room as the key to getting an honest answer out of Douglas. “I’m only hesitating, Father, because I still do not know all these years later whether she really was lying. It was such a very long time ago; she was only twelve years old at the time. It seems unjust to rake over it now. Would you like to be judged by something you did in childhood?”

  “No, I should not like to be judged. But I might accept that the information had to be revealed. You know I will not judge Agnes ill, whatever you tell me. It strikes me that she has been rather hurt by life.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of it in all these years until you asked me that question,” he mused, and Gabriel could not help noticing his hand trembling, “but I still have no idea if it was a lie at all. You see, she went missing. It was soon after the telegram arrived to say that our father had been killed at Dunkirk. It was a terrible time; Mother was beside herself with grief, but she could never show weakness in front of anybody, and it came out as anger. Neither of us could breathe without her pouncing on us; it was terribly frightening.”

  “I’m so sorry. How old were you?”

  “I was fifteen. Too young to be called up at that stage but desperate to go and fight. Then Agnes disappeared. She went off to play on her own at first light. I suppose she was not sleeping very well at the time because she was upset about Father and went out before I was up. Mother was not very concerned to begin with: we were both used to running wild, and it was almost a relief for Mother to have us out of the house. But when Agnes didn’t appear for breakfast or for lunch, Mother became anxious. You see, Agnes hadn’t taken any food out with her, so Mother at least expected her to come home to eat, but there was no sign of her. By three o’clock, Mother was beginning to panic. I have never seen her so terrified. We split forces and went round the town looking for her, asking shopkeepers if they had seen her. I went as far as Dr Whitehead’s house because I knew Agnes was friendly with his daughter, and down to the Miltons’ place, but they had not seen her either. Then suddenly, at dusk—and at that time of year sunset came late—she suddenly arrived at the door.”

  “Did she explain what had happened?”

  “No, that was the frightening thing. She put on this dreamy act as though she honestly did not understand why there was a problem. She kept saying, over and over again, ‘But I’ve only been a couple of hours; why are you so upset?’ Mother was shaking her, demanding she tell her where she’d been, but she kept insisting she didn’t know. Even I became impatient after a while. It was absurd.”

  “Had you any suspicion about where she had
been?”

  “No, none at all. The queerest thing about it is that no one had seen her. No one had any idea where she might be. For nearly twelve hours she really did seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and even she claimed she had no idea where she’d been. Mother became angrier and angrier; she shouted, threatened to do anything to her if she wouldn’t talk, but Aggie wouldn’t tell her anything, though she’s normally hopeless at keeping secrets. The next thing, Mother was throwing her about the room; one thing led to another; it all became very ugly. But Agnes still wouldn’t say where she’d been.”

  “Was your mother often violent?”

  Douglas stared down at his desk, surrounded by the spectres of his worst childhood memory: his mother shouting as she dragged Agnes into her study and the door slamming and his sister’s high-pitched screams as she resisted having a confession beaten out of her. He remembered the days of waiting and the messages of hope on the wireless that victory would be snatched from the jaws of disaster and the tales of brave Englishmen sailing in that glorious flotilla of fishing boats and yachts and dinghies to bring the boys home. But not his father. Not his father.

  “Douglas?”

  Douglas could not look up. “I don’t think I can recall her ever hitting me. Not once. She never needed to. Mother was usually very calm about the whole thing. Very cold and calculating. If either of us put a toe out of line, we’d get a disapproving look, and then she would tell us what we had done wrong and what punishment we had incurred, rather the way she would have behaved at school. She was quite keen on locking us up when we misbehaved; she knew we hated being cooped up.”

  “But on that occasion, she was frightened and angry.”

  “Yes. I had never seen her so out of control before. I can still hear Agnes screaming through the locked door, but she didn’t tell her anything. She screamed and screamed. If we had lived in the middle of town, I think the police would have come to the door, but no one could hear. If Dr Whitehead had not arrived when he did, I’m really not sure what would have happened.”

  Gabriel started. “What brought Dr Whitehead to your house? It was hardly on his way anywhere.”

  “He knew Agnes was missing, of course; he was worried and came to see if she had been found. She made a lot of people worry that day. He heard the commotion and helped me force open the study door. The terrible thing is, when Dr Whitehead carried Agnes upstairs to her room, I felt angry with her. I kept thinking, ‘Why on earth didn’t she just tell the truth? Why let Mother do that to her?’ Mother had a right to know where Agnes had been; we’d all been worried sick. I could not understand at the time how she could be so stubborn. It seemed unkind to keep lying like that, over and over again, saying she didn’t know where she’d been when she was the only person who could have known.”

  “Did she know you were angry with her?”

  Douglas shook his head. “I hope not. I felt guilty about it later. It took her weeks to recover, and, in some ways, she never did. Agnes was very quiet, very on edge after that.”

  Gabriel sat in silence for a long time, a response that only made Douglas the more agitated, and Gabriel watched the young man light up yet another cigarette, his hands shaking with the effort. “You know you have nothing to be ashamed of. You are ashamed, aren’t you?”

  Douglas ran a hand across his face, staring up into the corner of the room the way people sometimes do when they are trying to focus their minds. “I felt angry with myself afterwards for feeling angry with Agnes, but at fifteen, all I could think of was how stupid she had been, going off and scaring everyone half to death, then provoking our mother into attacking her like that. Afterwards, I wished I’d been a man and defended her. Whatever it was she had done, nothing excuses what Mother did to her. She drew blood. Dr Whitehead was appalled.”

  “What do you think she had done?”

  “Agnes?” Douglas threw up his arms. “Can it really matter now, Father? I’m not sure I should have mentioned it at all. You can see what I mean when I say I’m not sure she was lying. The saddest part of it is, I doubt she was up to anything very naughty. She was never a naughty girl. At most, it was some silly mischief that would have earned her a rap on the knuckles and bed without supper, but perhaps in her mind it was more important than that. She may have imagined she’d done something very wicked and Mother would never forgive her. The only other possibility, I suppose, is that she really couldn’t remember.”

  “Amnesia? Concussion?”

  “It’s plausible, surely?” Douglas sounded a little flustered, a professional man being drawn on a subject about which he knew he was ignorant. “Perhaps she suffered some accident while she was out playing, had a nasty fall and hit her head. Maybe a heavy branch dropped on her? I don’t know, she certainly behaved like someone with concussion, and Dr Whitehead thought it was probably that. That was what we told everyone anyway. It would certainly explain her confusion.”

  Gabriel stood up slowly, patting Douglas’ arm to indicate that he need not get up to see him out. “Thank you, Douglas, that has been most helpful. Now I suppose I should leave you in peace.” Douglas looked stonily through the smoke, and Gabriel knew he was itching for his guest to leave so that he could take out his hip flask. “You should go home,” suggested Gabriel, picking up his hat and drifting to the door. “You’re not doing yourself any good burning the midnight oil. Who knows? There may still be some innocent explanation for all of this.”

  Douglas stood up out of sheer force of habit. “Father, you don’t really believe that, do you?”

  Gabriel shook his head wearily. “I’m sorry, I don’t like to give up hope until I have to, but I think you should prepare yourself for the worst, if you haven’t already. There is some very great evil at work here, and I don’t mean the ghost of a man who never existed.”

  “It’s all right, Father, I will go home,” promised Douglas, holding open the door for him. “I’m being a coward holing myself up here.”

  “Thank you, I hate to think of Agnes all alone out there. If she really didn’t have anything to do with it, she may well be in danger now. She has disappeared before.”

  You have disappeared before, Agnes, thought Gabriel, as he walked slowly along the eerily silent high street. Why were you returned, and who returned you? And if you came back alive, why am I so certain your mother never will? Why do I know that she is already dead?

  6

  Was it merely a coincidence that two inhabitants of the same household disappeared without a trace? Gabriel wondered over breakfast the following morning. Although the disappearances occurred years apart, Gabriel could not help but think they were related.

  The savage way in which Enid Jennings had dealt with her daughter did not, unfortunately, surprise him at all. Very few examples of human cruelty could shock a man at his stage of life, and he could easily imagine how a woman like Enid might respond if she were frightened, angry and repeatedly thwarted by a child from whom she demanded absolute obedience and deference.

  But Agnes’ disappearance for twelve hours—that did surprise him. If Douglas had said that Agnes had provoked an angry scene for anything else—wandering off with a friend, stealing apples from a farmer’s orchard—he would have been surprised that she had had the freedom of spirit to do such a thing, but it would have told him very little of any use. Her disappearance, on the other hand . . . Still mulling things over, Gabriel put on his shoes, picked up his breviary and crossed the courtyard into the church to say his morning prayers.

  Fr Foley had finished saying Mass only fifteen minutes before, and the church felt warmer than it would otherwise have done, even though it was already virtually empty. An old man knelt near the back, praying the Rosary; nearer the front, at the side chapel to Saint Patrick, a child dropped a coin into the box with a clink and began the fiddly task of lighting one of the penny candles and spiking it onto the metal rack beneath the statute of the Apostle of Ireland.

  The Lady Chapel was at the front o
f the church, in the left-hand corner, separated from the sanctuary by a thin wall of plaster. Gabriel had an enduring fondness for this little corner of the church. There were always fresh flowers and a few candles burning, but it also contained the one truly beautiful piece of art in the entire church, a vast oil painting bequeathed to the parish by a local couple who had lost four of their sons in the Great War. The painting was a reproduction of a much older Madonna and child; both Mary and Jesus wore Renaissance dress, but Mary looked as young as she would have been, with a round, girlish face full of wonder; her hair beneath its white veil was thick and dark, setting off her tawny skin tones and huge brown eyes. Unlike so many depictions of the Blessed Mother, she did not look Italian or French or Anglo-Saxon; she was a young Jewish girl holding a chubby, rosy-cheeked toddler with one plump arm held up in blessing and the other pressing gently against his mother’s shoulder as though protecting her. There was an easy domesticity about the painting that enchanted Gabriel, and he often found himself looking up from the words in his book to gaze at the picture.

  As Gabriel reached the Lady Chapel, he realised that there was someone there already, and he stepped a little more quietly so as not to disturb her. It always felt like an invasion of privacy to interrupt a person at prayer, and he knew who it was. Her white mantilla partially concealed her face, but as he knelt on the steps of the sanctuary and looked sideways at her, he could see Agnes deep in thought. He suspected that she had spent much of Mass in tears and was only just beginning to compose herself, but she looked up at the picture with all the agony of a person mourning the loss of a mother or, in Agnes’ case, mourning the mother she had never had.

  Gabriel contemplated going over to her and offering some words of comfort, but he knew she could only want to be left alone, so he walked slowly out of the church, steeling himself against the cold as he stepped outside.