Deception and Desire (19 page)

Ros's spare car keys. She'd said she'd look for them and here they were, practically presenting themselves for her attention. Maggie decided to forgo the soup and go straight into Bristol to check out Ros's car. She ran a bath and the warm water revived her further; by the time she left the cottage, albeit still moving at a slower rate than usual, the headache was not much more than a dull throb.

Driving into Bristol she found herself thinking of Mike and the spark of attraction she had felt for him; it seemed now almost like a dream sequence that had never really happened at all. And as the traffic built up for the city Maggie, who had not driven in Bristol for years, was forced to concentrate hard on trying to remember which lane she should be in to get to the railway station. There were roadworks at the Bath Bridge causing congestion and confusion but she negotiated them at last, turned into the station forecourt and found a parking space. Then she set out to look for Ros's car and eventually found it, parked not far from her own.

As she had expected the car was scrupulously clean and tidy. There was a telescopic umbrella and a silk scarf on the rear seat (how Ros loved her silk scarves!), a box of tissues in the rear window and a chamois leather, a road map and a wallet containing the car's service history in various pockets. Otherwise, nothing. Maggie slid into the driver's seat and sat quietly, running her eye over the dashboard, covered now with a thin film of dust, and fighting a feeling of disappointment. Trust Ros to remove every scrap of rubbish. Her own car, she knew, would be a mine of information, however useless, on her activities of previous weeks – shopping lists and empty cigarette packets, sweet wrappers and used tissues. She yanked open the ashtray. There were no cigarette ends, of course – Ros didn't smoke – just one screwed-up stick-on ticket from a pay-and-display car park, dated two weeks earlier, and showing four hours' parking bought in the nearby city of Bath. Beyond that there was nothing.

Maggie leaned back in the seat, hands on the steering wheel.

Why did you park here, Ros? Where were you going? And why haven't you come back? Can't you tell me – wherever you are? Don't you know I'm worried about you?

Quite suddenly she stiffened. Unconsciously she had stretched out her legs into a driving position – but she had not encountered the pedals. Gooseflesh ran up her arms. She sat up, reaching out again with her legs. Her toes met brake and clutch, but that first instinctive suspicion was confirmed.

She couldn't drive the car with the seat in this position and certainly Ros, who was, if anything, an inch or two shorter than she was, couldn't have driven it either. The police had said that the fact that the car was parked here at the station meant Ros must have gone off somewhere on a train, implying she must therefore have left of her own free will. But the position of the driving seat proved one thing beyond doubt.

Whoever had driven it here and left it, it had certainly not been Ros.

When her head stopped spinning Maggie glanced at her watch. The shock of her discovery had made her head start thumping again; now all she could think of was that she wanted to talk to Mike.

The hands of her watch showed 3.24 – too late, certainly, to telephone the office of the school where he taught. They would be closed now, if she knew anything about school offices, pulling down their shutters with the last bell. Would Mike have left yet? He wouldn't be teaching now but he might be running some after-school activity or relaxing in the staff room with a cup of tea.

Almost feverish in her haste, Maggie locked Ros's car, hurried back to her own hired one and drove out into the afternoon traffic. The congestion around the Bath Bridge was worse than ever, a huge chaotic jam, and she sat tensely, edging forward nose to tail, willing a gap to open and let her through. She knew more or less where Mike's school was situated; what she didn't know was his home address. If he left school before she got there she didn't know how to contact him, and because of her dinner date with Dinah Marshall she wouldn't be seeing him this evening either.

Beyond the Bath Bridge traffic jam the road was reasonably clear. Maggie put her foot down as hard as she dared whilst searching for the road she wanted, and then the ‘School' sign. She was lost; admit it, these streets all looked identical – rows of houses, all similar, a small arcade of shops, a couple of tower blocks of flats – she'd never find it, even calm and with all her wits about her, never. A couple of women were wheeling pushchairs along the pavement; Maggie pulled over and wound the window down to ask directions, her hand shaking so much she could scarcely turn the handle.

To her intense relief the women knew the school, which was, they said, just around the corner. She followed their directions and there it was – a gateway topped with a huge signboard, sprawling dirty-grey buildings and, unbelievably, a playing field where a game of cricket was in progress.

There was something almost incongruous about seeing a game of cricket being played here, in the middle of this run-down area of the city, as if a village green had somehow been uprooted and plonked down, a piece of a jigsaw that did not quite fit, and the gaggle of mini-skirted girls lounging in the sunshine to watch in no way resembled the spectators Maggie had ever seen outside a pavilion on a summer afternoon. What was good about it was that since Mike was head of PE the chances were that if a match was being played he would still be here.

Maggie parked on the perimeter road and started across the field, wondering what she would do if Mike was actually umpiring. A cricket match could go on for hours and she could hardly interrupt. But as she approached she recognised his tracksuited figure standing under the wall of the pavilion.

Engrossed in the game, he did not notice her until she reached him.

‘Maggie – what are you doing here?'

‘Mike – thank goodness! I have to talk to you.'

‘Why, what's happened?'

She told him, the words tumbling out.

‘She couldn't have been the last person to drive the car, Mike. She couldn't have reached the pedals. Whoever parked it outside the station, it wasn't Ros.'

‘You're sure the seat didn't slide back when you were poking about?' His face seemed to have frozen.

‘I don't think so, no. I'd have noticed, I'm sure. Mike, I think we should tell the police about this.'

‘You haven't yet?'

‘No. All I could think of was telling you. But it must make a difference, mustn't it? It's a piece of hard evidence. Perhaps they'll take notice now. I mean, I couldn't see anything in the car to suggest who might have been driving it, but they could get their forensic people to go over it, couldn't they? And just the fact it was dumped at the station is suspicious.'

‘How do you mean – suspicious?'

‘Someone wanted us to think that Ros had left it there and gone away by train. I'm frightened, Mike.'

‘Calm down now.' He laid a hand on her arm. She resisted the urge to cling to it.

‘I don't feel very calm. The more I find out the more certain I am something terrible has happened to her. Brendan …'

‘You think Brendan might be behind it?'

‘Well, yes, I do. He'd be capable of anything, and I know Ros was afraid of him. Brendan's tall, the seat could have been in the correct position for him to drive. Then there was her scarf at his flat. And there's something else I didn't tell you. Brendan told me he'd seen Ros a few weeks ago in Clifton with a man.'

Through the touch of his fingers she felt him stiffen slightly.

‘A man.'

‘That's what he said – though I'm not sure if I believe him. He could have said it to divert suspicion away from himself. I think we should go to the police again, Mike, with all these fresh bits of evidence. I think …'

A roar from the cricket field made them both turn. One of the batsmen had been dismissed and was stomping bad-temperedly back towards the pavilion.

‘Look, Maggie, I can't really stay talking now,' Mike said. ‘Leave it with me. I'll ring the police station. And if you want to, give me a buzz when you get back from Dinah Marshall's.'

‘I don't actually have your number.'

‘Don't you? Oh, I suppose you don't …' She found her diary and a pen and he wrote down the number and handed it back to her. ‘ I'll hear from you, Maggie. Right?'

He squeezed her hand and turned away, and she was suffused with a sudden longing to beg him to give her a little more time, as if just by his continued presence he could make the nightmare go away. She knew she was being ridiculous, that Mike was as helpless as she, and there was nothing to be gained by going over and over it – nothing but the comfort that she drew from sharing her fears. Or was there more to it than that? When she had made her disturbing discovery she had been able to think of nothing but telling Mike. She could have gone to the police herself but she hadn't – she had raced straight to him. And why? Was it more than anxiety to tell him about her discovery? Was it simply that she had wanted to see Mike?

The thought shook her to the marrow, filling her with guilt and horror. Maggie hitched her bag up on her shoulder, turned and walked back to where she had left her car.

Mike checked the score, held a brief conversation with his opposite number from the visiting team and went back to watching the cricket match. But his mind was no longer on it – if it had been before. Now he could think of nothing but the pieces of information Maggie had imparted.

Most damning, he supposed, was the position of the driving seat in Ros's car. From experience he knew that what Maggie had said was true; Ros always kept it pretty far forward. On the few occasions he had driven the car he'd had to move it back quite some way to accommodate his long legs. It was possible, as he had suggested, that it had somehow slid back when Maggie had been foraging about, for clues, but he would have thought she would have noticed.

So, if Ros hadn't been driving when the car was parked outside the station, who had? Maggie suspected Brendan but Mike couldn't see it somehow. His solidly unimaginative and logical mind couldn't accept that the man would suddenly take it into his head to do her some harm now, when they had been separated for so long. But of course there was the fact that Maggie had seen Ros's scarf in his flat to add weight to the suggestion; if it really was the one she had sent Ros for her birthday then he must have been lying when he said he had not seen her since before Christmas.

Except that he hadn't said that, exactly. He'd said he'd seen her in Clifton with a man.

A muscle tightened in Mike's stomach. Had that been another lie, or was it the truth? As Maggie had remarked, Brendan could have been trying to throw in a red herring. But somehow he didn't think so. Though it made him both angry and sad, he was almost inclined to believe it might be the truth. There had been something about Ros in the weeks before he went away that had aroused his suspicions, a feeling that she had withdrawn from him slightly, that there were things she was leaving unsaid, perhaps secrets she was keeping. He hadn't wanted to believe it then and he didn't want to believe it now, yet he was unable to dismiss out of hand the possibility that she was seeing someone else.

The almost unexplored possibility that had nevertheless been nagging at him reared its head suddenly, striking at the most vulnerable spot in his armour – his male pride – and reopening old wounds which had nothing to do with Ros but which had been inflicted by Judy, his first wife, who had left him for another man.

Across the years the remembered pain reached out to engulf Mike. He had loved Judy with the simple, straightforward, total love of a trusting and uncomplicated man. He had believed in her, been completely faithful to her, and it had never for one moment crossed his mind that she might not respond in exactly the same way. Blind, blind, blind!

Tony Finlay had been his best friend. As schoolboys they had been inseparable and even when life took them on different courses they had kept in close touch. He would have trusted Tony, too, with his life. But that hadn't stopped the pair of them from having an affair behind his back. And one day Judy had told him, almost without preamble, that she was leaving him for Tony.

The blow to both his heart and his pride had been terrible; for a long while, hurt and bitter, Mike had thought he would never get involved with another woman. He had changed jobs, got himself a bachelor flat, made a new life. And then he had met Ros.

Ros was all kinds of things Judy was not. Where Judy had been soft and funny Ros was sharp and sophisticated, where Judy had been unambitious and apparently home-loving, Ros was the epitome of the career girl, totally wedded to her job. Her independence had fascinated Mike – there was an honesty about it that he felt had been sadly lacking in his marriage.

It was an attraction of opposites – Ros liked socialising, Mike preferred the quiet life, Ros's agile mind was scarcely ever idle, Mike could sit in silence contemplating nothing more demanding than the latest rugby result or test match score. But they were surprisingly compatible, each effortlessly complementing the personality of the other, and they fell gradually into a closer and closer relationship which Mike supposed, if he thought about it at all, must be love, though it was quite different from the way he had felt about Judy.

But although they were soon lovers and constant companions neither wanted to move the relationship on to a more formal footing. Both had failed marriages behind them, both were reluctant to commit themselves again. They enjoyed each other's company, but they also enjoyed the personal freedom that came from having their own, quite separate, homes.

Now, with a sense of shock, Mike realised that whilst rejecting commitment he had expected fidelity. Jealousy, creeping up on him unawares, gave him a brief empathy with Brendan. Had Ros cheated on him, he wondered, as Judy had cheated? Was she cheating now, with someone else? Perhaps it was just past experience that was making him overly sensitive – Ros had, after all, never given him the slightest cause to seriously believe she might be two-timing him – but the pieces of information Maggie had imparted so innocently were resurrecting old hurts and making him increasingly suspicious of Ros's motives.