Authors: Peter Lovesey
Rose went white with anger. Imogen had no right to discuss her as if she were some dead laboratory animal pinned out for dissection. She was intelligent, for God’s sake. She could hear what was being said.
Before she opened her mouth to object, Ada said, ‘The point is, we can’t be too careful. Yesterday, some gorilla claimed to know Rose and then tried to force her into a car. I was there. We both had to fight to get away.’
Imogen quickly said, ‘It’s all right, Ada. There’s no question of any deception here. Miss Jenkins has satisfied me that she’s Rose’s sister. She has proof. Photos.’
Doreen Jenkins picked her handbag off the back of a chair, unzipped it and opened a pigskin wallet. And she had enough tact to address Rose directly. ‘Here’s one of you with Mummy in the garden at Twickenham.’ She handed across a standard-size colour print of two women arm in arm in front of a lavender bush.
Rose had to steady the photo from shaking in her hand. Here was a large, smiling middle-aged woman in a print dress. The other was younger, slimmer, dark-haired, with the face she saw in mirrors, the face she had learned to accept as her own. Sharply focused and in a good light, the likeness couldn’t be dismissed. ‘This is me with my mother?’ she said, frowning.
‘Yes, and she’s my mummy, too, of course,’ said Doreen Jenkins, smiling. ‘Look at some others.’ She handed across two more. ‘They’re more recent. I don’t know where they were taken. Probably on holiday. I didn’t take them. I got them from you.’
Imogen, suddenly at Rose’s side and squeezing her arm, said, ‘There isn’t any doubt, is there? It’s you.’
A detail in these extra pictures clinched it. Both were shots of Rose alone, one seated on a drystone wall, the other standing in a doorway. In each she was wearing the belt she had been found in and was wearing now, its large steel buckle unmistakable. Probably the jeans were the same designer pair she had damaged in the accident.
Ada came over to look. ‘Pity,’ she said. ‘We were shaping up nicely as sleuths, weren’t we, petal?’
Rose turned to the woman she now had to accept as her stepsister. She had to force herself to speak. ‘Did I hear right just now? Did you call me Roz?’
Doreen nodded. ‘That’s your name. Rosamund.’
Imogen said in a self-congratulating tone, ‘I wasn’t far out, calling you Rose.’
‘What’s my surname - Jenkins?’
‘No,’ said Doreen. ‘You’re Rosamund Black. You and I had different fathers. Mummy got a divorce in 1972. It’s so peculiar having to tell you this.’
It was more peculiar listening to it, struggling to believe it. ‘Rosamund Black,’ she repeated as if the name might trigger some reaction in her brain. She ought to feel genuine warmth for this woman who was her stepsister and had gone to the trouble of finding her. Instead she felt like running out of the room. Now that the uncertainty was removed she was panicking. She wasn’t sure that she could face any more truth about herself.
Imogen said, ‘When you’ve had a chance to take it in, everything will fall into place.’
Doreen said, ‘I’m going to take care of you.’
‘I’m not sick,’ Rose snapped back, then softened it to, ‘I can take care of myself, now that you tell me who I am. How did you find me?’
‘We tracked you down,’ Doreen answered. ‘Mummy was worried. You always phone her Sunday nights, wherever you are, and you missed last week. When she tried you, there was no answer. You can imagine the state she was in, with her imagination. She’s always reading stuff in the papers about women disappearing. Remember the fuss she made about your trip to Florida? I suppose not. Well, you still managed to call her from the States at the usual time. What with Mummy going spare, I promised to make some enquiries. Jackie - your friend, Jackie Mays - thought you’d said something about a weekend in Bath. Some hotel deal. She didn’t know which one. I phoned a few without success, and then Jerry said he’d got a week owing to him so why didn’t we go down and stay at a bed and breakfast. The first or second person we asked said there had been a report in the local paper about a woman who’d lost her memory. It was you - my own sister! When I saw your picture, I phoned the social services and here I am.’
‘Who’s Jerry?’
Doreen gave her a surprised look. ‘My bloke.’
‘Does he know me?’
‘Of course he does. I’ve been living with him for the last three years. You’re going to stay with us tonight. I insist, and so does Jerry. There are spare rooms in the place where we are out at Bathford. It’s a lovely spot and it’ll do you good.’
Rose said - and it must have sounded ungrateful, but she refused to be swamped by all the concern - ‘I’d rather get home if you’d tell me where it is.’
Imogen said quickly, ‘That might not be such a good idea. You’d be better off with your family until your memory comes back.’
Doreen took Rose’s hand and said, ‘We can help you remember things. Between us we’ll soon get you right. You’ll be home in no time. Promise.’
She tugged her hand away. ‘For God’s sake, will you all stop treating me like a four-year-old?’
She was angry with herself as much as them, playing the spoilt brat and insisting they treated her with respect. She felt guilty giving bad reactions to this well-meaning sister who wanted to take her over. There was no way she could explain the degree of alienation seething within her.
She asked, ‘Where do I live?’
‘Hounslow,’ said Doreen. ‘Quite close to Mummy. We’ll take you back in a day or two. Now that Jerry’s here, he’d like to see a little more of Bath. It
is
his holiday.’
‘Tell me the address. I’m perfectly able to travel.’
‘We wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Doreen, taking a more assertive line. ‘What if you had another blackout? Look, I know you want to be independent. So would I. We’re like that, aren’t we, you and I? Believe me, Roz, you need someone to keep an eye on you, at least until we know you’re back to normal.’
‘Doreen’s right,’ Imogen weighed in, in her role as social worker. ‘There’s nothing like the support of one’s family.’
Doreen said, ‘You must speak to Mummy as soon as possible and put her mind at rest. We can ring her from the place where we’re staying.’
Imogen said, ‘You can call from here. There’s a payphone downstairs.’
‘Let’s do it now,’ said Doreen.
All this had happened at a pace too fast for Rose - or Roz -to take in. She didn’t yet feel comfortable with this stepsister who wanted to take her over and she balked at the prospect of phoning a mother she didn’t recognise. Naively she had imagined being reunited with her family would solve her problems, restore the life she had been severed from, but she was discovering that she didn’t want to be claimed by these people she still regarded as strangers. She needed more time to adjust.
She said to Doreen, ‘You call if you like. I’d rather not speak to her yet’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d feel uncomfortable and it would show in my voice. You can tell her what happened. Say I haven’t got my memory back yet.’
Doreen’s expression tightened. ‘I think you ought to speak to her.’
Imogen was nodding.
Ada backed her friend. ‘Jesus, if it was my Mum, all she’d want to know is that I was alive and kicking. But if I sounded like a zombie on the end of the line, she’d go bananas.’ She told Doreen, ‘You cover for your sister, love. Phone’s on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. You can’t miss it.’
Ada’s air of authority succeeded. Doreen Jenkins sighed, shrugged and left the room.
Ada asked Rose, ‘What’s up, kiddo? You ought to be over the moon. Don’t you take to your long-lost sister?’
‘That’s immaterial,’ said Rose.
‘In other words, she’s a right cow.’
‘Ada, I didn’t say that!’
‘The trouble is, we can’t choose our families,’ said Ada. ‘We’re stuck with the beauties we’ve got. I can talk. The Shaftsbury mob could teach the Borgias tricks. You managed to escape yours for a bit, and now they’ve caught up with you.’
Imogen, as usual, tried to compensate for Ada’s outspokenness. ‘I found her pleasant to deal with, and there can’t be any doubt. She’s made a special trip from London to find you.’
‘I know.’
‘The photos clinch it, don’t they?’
Rose folded her arms. ‘It’s hard to put into words the way I feel. I’m sure she’s doing this from the best motive. I suppose I’m panicking a bit. Or pig-headed. Part of me doesn’t want to be taken over. You see, I feel perfectly well in myself. I could manage. I can manage, here, with Ada.’
‘What you’re overlooking,’ said Imogen, with a hard edge to her voice, ‘is that you’ve been managing with the help of Avon Social Services. That was fine while you were homeless and without family. Now, you see, the rules have altered. I can’t let you stay here when your own people are willing to take you back.’
‘You’re kicking me out, in other words.’
‘I’ve got my job to do.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Why put it off until tomorrow? Your sister’s offering you a comfortable room somewhere.’
Ada put a beefy arm around Rose’s shoulders. ‘Life’s a bummer. Like we said, petal, whatever, wherever. Let me know when you get home. Directly, right?’
Rose nodded.
‘In fact, I’ll give you one of my cards.’ Ada went to the cupboard beside her bed.
‘Your
what
?’
said Imogen.
Ada had been full of surprises from the start, but the idea of a homeless woman having cards to hand out was the most incredible yet.
The expression on Imogen’s face was priceless.
‘You can have one, too, if you like,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve got about two thousand.’ What she had was a handful of postcards. ‘Aerial views of Bath. Lovely, aren’t they?’
Imogen said, ‘Ada, you’re the limit’
Ada gave her a disdainful look, ‘They’re legit. I got them out of a skip, sweetie. They’re all fuzzy. Some cock-up with the printing. They were being chucked out. How many do you want?’
Imogen shook her head.
Rose told Ada, ‘You’ve been more than a good friend. You’ve kept me sane.’
‘Send me one of these as soon as you get back to Hounslow, right?’ said Ada, putting a bunch of them in her hand. ‘And when you’ve got yourself together again, come and see me. I’ll be here if I’m not doing another stretch - and if I am I’d still appreciate a visit.’
Rose couldn’t speak any more. She picked a Sainsbury’s bag off the back of a chair and started putting her few possessions into it.
The farm ‘at Tormarton’ turned out to be closer to Acton Turville than Tormarton, Diamond only discovered after cruising the lanes for three-quarters of an hour. This was a corner of the county he seldom visited, unless you could call racing through on the motorway a visit. On this bleak October afternoon, contending with patches of mist, he concluded that if any stretch of countryside could absorb a three-lane motorway without appreciable loss of character, it was this. The two people he met and asked for directions said they couldn’t help. Locals both, they hadn’t heard of a farmer called Gladstone. When eventually he found the farm (luckily spotting a police vehicle at the end of a mud track) he had no difficulty in understanding how the body had lain undiscovered for up to a week. The stone cottage looked derelict. The outbuildings were overgrown with a mass of soggy Old Man’s Beard, its hairy awns, silver in high summer, now as brown as if the Old Man smoked sixty a day.
The remoteness of the place meant that he could not in all conscience tell Wigfull that he merely happened to be passing. Instead he gave no explanation at all when he hailed the party of diggers.
‘Any progress, John?’
If Dracula himself had stepped out of the mist Wigfull could not have been more startled.
‘I said how’s it going?’
‘What are you…?’
‘Is there any progress?’
‘If shifting half a ton of soil is progress, yes,’ Wigfull succeeded in saying.
‘But you haven’t found anything?’
‘If you insist on standing there,’ said Wigfull, ‘you’ll get your shoes dirty.’ It sounded more like a threat than a warning. He was more sensibly clad than Diamond, in gumboots and overalls.
Diamond took a step back. Perhaps to make the point for Wigfull, one of the men at work in the hole deposited a chunk of soil where the big detective had been standing.
Pre-empting the next question, Wigfull said, ‘It’s an exploratory dig. We’re keeping an open mind.’
‘Sensible. How deep do you intend to go?’
‘When we come to the end of the loose stuff, we stop.’
‘Sounds as if you’re almost there.’
‘Possibly.’ Alerted to the fact that this was the critical point in the excavation, Wigfull bent over the hole and instructed the two diggers to take care.
Diamond, too, stepped closer and peered in. The depth was a little over four feet. ‘Difficult to see. You want some lighting on a day like this.’
Wigfull didn’t respond.
The spades were definitely scraping on the bedrock. One of the diggers climbed out and the other asked for a rake. It was increasingly obvious that nothing so bulky as a corpse was buried there. Diamond stepped away from the trench and took a few paces across the field. ‘There’s another hole here, by the look of it,’ he reported.
‘We know,’ said Wigfull with ill-concealed annoyance. ‘There are three, at least.’
‘I’ll see if I can find some more for you.’ Why, he thought after he’d spoken, did Wigfull bring out the worst in him?
In a penitent mood, he took a slow walk around the boundary of the late Farmer Gladstone’s land, in truth not looking for more evidence of recent digging. The methodical Wigfull could be relied on to find anything suspicious. Instead, he mused on the purpose of the holes. If they weren’t used to bury things, what were they for? A search? There was the stock story of the recluse who leads a frugal life and secretly has a hoard of money that he buries. Had someone heard of the old man’s suicide and come shifting earth on the off-chance? Three trenches suggested rather more confidence than an off-chance.
The neglected field was a conservationist’s ideal, the hedge bristling with small trees and shrubs, with mud-slides showing evidence of badgers along the far side. He stopped and looked over the hedge at the deep ploughing that presumably indicated someone else’s land. What had the neighbours to say about old Gladstone? he wondered. And had they noticed anyone digging on his land in recent days?