Night Visit (8 page)

The
shops were filled with summer clothes, T-shirts, espadrilles, bikinis and swimsuits together with strappy dresses and shorts. The antique shop threw out the sparkle of freshly polished furniture and bright, washed ornaments. There was even a nineteen twenties picnic basket complete with crystal wine glasses and flowered bone china set out on a checked table-cloth. Very imaginative. Next door was a children’s outfitters. I lingered for a while, admiring the pretty dresses, tastefully set out with buckets and spades, mock sandcastles and plastic inflatable ducks and I yearned for the time when Rosie would have worn such feminine fripperies, in the days before she had defected to saggy T-shirts and leggings. I glanced at my watch and moved on.

Even
the butcher’s shop was making an effort to match the hot weather with trussed chickens, barbecued chicken breasts, and long lamb kebabs together with pieces of fillet steak begging for charcoal. I spotted the butcher near the back of the shop, chopping up meat for a customer, and carried on walking with an uncomfortable feeling that I had seen something to disturb me. It lasted all the way up the hill until I reached the bow-fronted windows of the bistro and pushed open the door.

It
was almost empty inside, apart from a table of girls who looked as though they were celebrating something. A birthday, leaving work, a wedding, a baby? Ruth was propping up the bar, sipping a drink. She put the glass down heavily and gave me a long, lugubrious look before flinging her arms around me. ‘Harry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. It was a rotten start to the New Year.’

A
wave of bitterness swamped me and again I was glad that the Carnforths had called me out that night and saved me from both my friends’ sympathy and my own embarrassment. But summoning the Carnforths back into my mind evoked the tinge of unease. It was a little more awareness. In one of the shop windows I had seen something that had reminded me of Melanie. Troubled, I fished around at the back of my mind, mentally walking back down the hill.

Not
the butcher’s? A swift vision of the rows of red meat, trussed chickens, the kebabs. Butcher standing in striped apron, long knife in his hand. Not there.

I
would know it when I found it.

My
mind moved backwards to the children’s outfitters, plaster model children, buckets and spades, sandcastles, paper flags and plastic ducks, a woman in a red dress serving someone. But again I failed to find the cause for my feeling of discomfort. It had not been there.

So
back to the antiques shop? The most unlikely candidate, surely? But straight away the hammering was there, right at the back of my mind. Shining objects, gleaming furniture, china, pictures...

‘
Back to the present.’ Ruth was staring at me. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost. Harriet, whatever’s the matter?’

I
tried really hard to laugh it off but Ruth wasn’t buying. ‘Come on, Harry,’ she said. ‘We’re friends enough for you to confide in me.’

‘
I think I must have spotted something,’ I said, ‘in one of the shops. It reminded me of a story I heard recently.’

‘
Well, it must have upset you.’

‘
Yes it did,’ I said. ‘More than I realised.’

‘
So what was it?’

‘
That’s the trouble,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what it was. I only know it registered at the time.’

‘
I meant what was the story?’

‘
Ruth,’ I said abruptly, ‘how long have you lived in Larkdale?’

She
gave one of her loud, throaty laughs. ‘More years than I care to remember.’ I waited. ‘About twenty years,’ she said. ‘I think it was 1978 when we came here. I started as deputy head practically fresh from university.’

‘
Do you remember a little girl going missing, about ten years ago?’

She
frowned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do, vaguely. A little kid of about six. Wasn’t she staying with her grandparents? Weren’t they farmers?’

‘
They’re patients of mine,’ I said. ‘At least the grandfather was.’

‘
Was?’

‘
He died early this year but the grandmother is still living in the same place.’

‘
Somewhere up in the forest, wasn’t it? A farm?’

I
nodded. ‘More of a smallholding.’ Ruth waited. ‘At the time,’ I said, ‘what did you think happened to the child?’

She
wrinkled her nose up. ‘Well, at first everyone thought she’d simply wandered off. She was only little and the forest is enormous. Goes on for miles. Besides. You know there’s a quarry up there. It’s quite steep. She could easily have fallen.’

‘
And later,’ I asked. ‘When they failed to find her? What did you think then?’

‘
Well, I think after a week or so most people discounted the possibility that she had simply fallen. I mean they would have found her—wouldn’t they?’

I
nodded. ‘So?’

‘
It seemed more likely that someone had abducted and murdered her.’

‘
Who?’

‘
Lots of people were dragged in for questioning. But no one was ever charged. Quite honestly,’ Ruth said, ‘I always thought they had the right man all the time. Some creepy character who’d been out walking his dog. At five o’clock in the morning? They questioned him but released him. No evidence.’ Her voice was crisply condemning.

‘
Who was it?’

Ruth
laughed. ‘I can’t remember his name, Harry. It was all a long time ago. You know how it is, ten-day wonders. It was rather horrible though, dragging the pools and checking through undergrowth. Arthur helped look for her.’ She smiled. ‘They gave him a whistle in case he found anything. I mean—Arthur.’ She looked curiously at me. ‘But I still can’t see why you’re even interested. It was ages before you came here. Surely even the grandparents got over it eventually?’

‘
Not really. Vera Carnforth told me,’ I said cautiously, ‘that the police even questioned Reuben about...’

Ruth
was quick to grasp my meaning. ‘Good gracious. Nobody believed that for a minute. He was in bed with his wife when the child went missing.’

‘
She was his alibi then?’

‘
I suppose so. But no one ever really thought it was him.’

‘
He thought they did. And so did his wife. And I suppose while the disappearance is unsolved they can’t prove otherwise. And of course now he’s dead. He’ll never know. His wife is anxious to clear his name and she wants to know what happened to the child.’

Ruth
’s face changed. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Poor thing to live under such suspicion.’

I
nodded. ‘He was a decent man, Ruth. I know it.’

‘
I don’t see what it’s got to do with you, Harriet. Surely it’s a job for the police. Not a family doctor.’

‘
I’m not appointing myself chief investigator.’ I blurted it out then. ‘On New Year’s Eve it was to the Carnforths’ farm that I was called. Reuben was dying.’ A vision of the bony fingers gave me sudden pain. ‘He asked me to help him. Naturally I thought he meant for me to cure his illness. But it wasn’t that. Later his wife told me he had blind faith that I could somehow help trace what had happened to his granddaughter.’

‘
That’s silly.’

‘
Of course it is,’ I said, ‘but silly or not I can’t stop thinking about it. And now today something’s made me even more aware of the little girl.’

She
leaned forward. ‘What?’

‘
I don’t know.’

‘
A toy shop? Did you pass a toy shop, Harry?’

‘
No.’

‘
Some kiddies’ clothes, then?’

I
frowned. ‘There was but I don’t think it was in there. They had all sorts of summer dresses, ducks and plastic buckets and things.’

‘
Well, she disappeared on a hot day in the middle of summer, didn’t she? In a red dress?’

Melanie
Toadstool
.

‘
A red dress with white spots.’

Ruth
looked even more concerned. ‘I can see you really are interested.’

I
nodded. ‘I’ll take another look on the way back.’

‘
Then I hope you find it,’ she said. ‘Because otherwise it will lie at the back of your mind and haunt you.’

‘
It is,’ I said cautiously.

She
gave me one of her warm smiles. Almost motherly. ‘This has really bothered you, hasn’t it?’

I
nodded. ‘I’ve been having dreams about it.’

‘
Why? Simply because he was your patient?’

‘
Maybe it’s not just Reuben’s charge,’ I said. ‘It’s Rosie. Since Robin went I’ve felt more vulnerable, more responsible for her.’

‘
Yes, poor Rosie.’

‘
She’s growing up very fast,’ I said.

We
chose our meal, sat back and made conversation, about Ruth’s work and the Ofsted schools inspectors, about my current position with the health service, then she asked about Rosie which gave me the opportunity to confide in her things I had not told anyone, how she sometimes wet the bed, how her new friends seemed different from her old ones, how my placid little daughter sometimes produced language that would have shocked the BBC.

‘
Have you told Robin?’

‘
He isn’t interested in her anymore.’

‘
Oh dear.’ Ruth gave a long sigh.

By
the time we had eaten the conversation seemed to run out and instinctively I knew that Ruth had asked me here for a purpose and not out of coincidence. My best friend and it had taken her the best part of an hour to pluck up the courage to ask me.

‘
Harriet,’ she began doggedly. ‘I wanted to ask you something. It’s medical,’ she warned, ‘but I didn’t want to come to the surgery. I felt too embarrassed.’

I
picked up my coffee cup. ‘So fire away,’ I said. ‘That’s what friends are for.’

Her
face was flushed scarlet.

I
put the cup back in the saucer and waited. Ruth was sitting facing the light so I could see her face very clearly. She was wearing more make-up than usual and it filled the deep creases around her eyes, the furrows between her eyebrows, the channels carved between her nose and mouth. I suddenly realised that Ruth was more colourful than she used to be. But, like the autumn, the colour announced her growing years instead of disguising them.

Without
warning her eyes filled. Annoyed, she gave a sniff. ‘Oh, bugger,’ she said, and gave a second sniff noisy enough to have earned any of her pupils a telling off. The water level in her eyes dropped. ‘I want a baby,’ she said simply. ‘I know I’m forty-six years old. I know I’ve always said I didn’t want children. I know all that,’ she finished defiantly.

I
was stunned. ‘But you’ve always said...’

‘
I know,’ she continued, ‘the HRT.’ She made another attempt at a smile. ‘I’m probably halfway through the menopause already but I want a child. I want one terribly badly.’

I
gawped at her. ‘But...’

‘
Of my own,’ she said fiercely. ‘It hit me a couple of weeks ago. I watch the children move through the school. But they leave, Harry. They leave. They are at the school for up to seven years and most of them go without a backwards glance. They go home to their mothers and fathers and I am left with the empty school. I have nothing of my own.’

She
cupped her chin in her hand. ‘I went in over the half term,’ she said, ‘and had a really good look around. All the stuff was still on the walls. One or two of the kids had left their coats behind.’ She gave me a humorous glance. ‘There was a frightful stink of old trainers and stale sports equipment but there wasn’t a single human being there.’ She stopped speaking for a moment and stared straight past me, in a world of her own. ‘It was so lonely, almost ghost-like. All those children vanishing into the world without trace.’

I
started. The feeling of something just behind me was as strong as the day I had first heard about Melanie. Luckily Ruth hadn’t noticed my lapse of concentration. She was still talking.

‘
It struck me then in that empty, silent school. It was like home.’

‘
Home? Ruth. Your home isn’t anything like that.’

‘
No?’ She challenged me. ‘How would you know?’

She
was wrecking all my delusions. ‘But you and Arthur are happy together, just yourselves.’

Her
eyebrows peaked in the middle. ‘Yes?’