Scarlet Feather (63 page)

‘And you have.’ He was cold.

‘I can’t leave her standing in a phone box waiting for you to ring,’ Cathy begged.

‘Thanks, Cathy, take the keys and stop worrying. They’ll turn up, those two, with some amazing explanation.’

In the middle of a street in London, Tom, she deserves more than that.’

He turned away. Cathy dialled the number.

‘Tom!’ The excitement in Marcella’s voice was almost hurtful to hear.

‘No, Marcella, I’m sorry, it’s Cathy again. I told him, and he’s not going to phone you. No, I don’t know why, but I didn’t want you standing there waiting.’

There was a silence. ‘Why won’t he even talk?’ Marcella sobbed.

I’m so very sorry,’ Cathy said, and she hung up and left the premises without even catching Tom’s eye.

‘It’s all my fault, I was so short with poor little Maud,’ Cathy wept at the kitchen table. ‘I kept saying things like Hurry up, and If that’s all, Maud…’ Everyone was startled. This wasn’t the Cathy they knew. Lizzie, Geraldine,Muttie and Sara all looked at each other helplessly. ‘And the awful thing is that she was being so kind, she was trying to get me a punchbowl from the shed and she didn’t even realise that it was stolen by her little shit of a brother.’

‘Simon?’Muttie asked, totally bewildered.

‘No, Walter, he has a shed full of things from our premises, I gather.’

Sara looked up sharply. ‘You think Walter was your burglar?’

‘Yes, he must have been. Maybe this has something to do with the children running away,’ she said anxiously.

‘Have you reported any of this? Does Neil know?’

‘No, I only heard yesterday or the day before, and I’ve been up to my tonsils in a wedding in the country.’

Sara seemed to think this was odd. ‘But if you thought that, surely you’d have told Neil?’

Cathy took no notice of her disapproving tone. ‘Did you say that Walter has gone from The Beeches?’

‘Yes, his mother thinks he went last night in a taxi… carrying a lot of bags,’ Sara said somewhat doubtfully.

Then suddenly Sara and Cathy looked at each other as the implication became clear. Sara took out her mobile phone and called the guards again.

At The Beeches, Kenneth and Kay waited for the guards to arrive. There was no news, but the guards needed to look in the garden shed and in Mr Walter Mitchell’s bedroom. They said that Ms Cathy Scarlet would be joining them shortly.

‘What does she want?’ Kenneth asked.

‘She is the daughter of the couple whose house the twins visited last night to collect their dog.’

‘They don’t
have
a dog,’ Kay said.

‘They think they do, madam, and Ms Scarlet is also married to your nephew, so could be considered family. I believe her husband is also joining her here.’

‘Huh,’ Kenneth said.

‘Mr Neil Mitchell is a barrister, sir; if you have any objection to our looking though the house, please state it now.’

‘And what would you do if I objected?’ Kenneth asked.

‘We’d get a search warrant,’ the young guard said simply.

I’m not saying he
did
steal the things, I’m only saying it’s a pretty odd coincidence,’ Cathy said to Neil as they drove to The Beeches.

‘We must be very careful not to go in hurling accusations,’ Neil warned. ‘Dad did tell me that he nicked a computer from work
and
didn’t turn up today, so it looks as if you’re right, but…’

‘And your drinky aunt thinks she heard him leaving with a lot of black plastic bags in a taxi last night…’

‘I know. And if he took them, Cathy, no mercy, you understand?’

‘No, I don’t believe you, in the end you’ll say he was a victim, he deserves our concern.’

‘What have I done, hon? Why are you fighting with
me
? Neil asked, aggrieved.

‘I don’t know, Neil, I really don’t. I want to kill Walter and I want to kill myself. If I had only been just a bit nicer, those two foolish children wouldn’t have run away.’

‘You’re working too hard. You just didn’t have the time,’ he said.

‘No, Neil, I just didn’t
make
the time, that’s different.’

‘But I have a surprise for you. I wasn’t going to tell you before, but I think you need it now.’

‘A surprise?’ she looked at him warily.

‘You
are
very tired, hon. I talked to Tom about it; he can spare you, he says, and I’ve booked us a week in Morocco!’

He waited to see her pleasure, but he was disappointed. ‘Neil, it’s kind of you, but no.’

‘It’s booked!’ he said.

‘I can’t think of anything now except those children, and I don’t really want to go away at all, we’re too busy.’

‘Tom said…’

‘Tom is a kind man, he says what he thinks people want him to say. Most of the time,’ she added, thinking of Marcella weeping down the phone. ‘Can we talk about it another time, Neil?’

‘Whenever you feel you’d like to give the time,’ he said huffily.

‘Well, not
now
, when we’re worried sick about the kids.’

‘Not any time, Cathy. There’s no time to talk to you these days, and no way of talking to you, either.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

His face was very hard.

‘If I talk about the miscarriage, I’m saying the wrong thing and upsetting you. If I don’t talk about it I’m hard and unfeeling and I’ve forgotten it.’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘Well, that’s the way it looks from here. And when I do something, get us away from here for a bit of peace…’

‘It’s not peace trekking through Morocco seeing would I like Africa

‘Oh,
shut up
, Cathy, there’s no pleasing you. If I suggested a holiday on the Isle of Man you wouldn’t want it either.’ His face was set in a look she hadn’t known before. He was very, very angry.

She spoke slowly. ‘I would be perfectly happy to go on holiday but only if we discuss it, not when you
tell
me you’ve booked something…’

‘Don’t worry, a holiday with you is the last thing on my mind,’ he said and they drove to The Beeches in silence.

The punchbowl was gone when the guards searched the shed, but there were a lot of other things that they asked Cathy to look at. At first she thought that she could see nothing that belonged to them. Then she saw some salad servers and a linen tablecloth.

‘The salad servers were a present from Neil’s parents last Christmas, the cloth has our laundry mark on it,’ she said in a small, flat voice.

Neil nodded gravely. The guards seemed entirely convinced. It would nail Walter when they found him.

Neil’s father made a statement to the guards about the missing computer. ‘And I want you to know that nephew or no nephew, we intend to go the distance on this one.’

They nodded, satisfied. ‘Do you have any explanation of why he might have taken the children, sir?’ The guards had long decided that there was little future in talking to the children’s parents. They had higher hopes of Jock Mitchell, who seemed normal and articulate and capable of understanding that two nine-year-olds had left a note and vanished from their home.

‘I can’t understand it at all,’ Jock Mitchell said. ‘He never mentioned them at all, and if I ever asked about them he was vague, as if he really didn’t know anything.’

‘He didn’t know they were there,’ Cathy said. ‘He never took them with him, I know that much for a fact. He high-tailed it out of here on his own because he thought we were onto him.’

‘But it’s too much of a coincidence that they should all go on the same day,’ Neil argued.

‘Neil, you never listened to him. I swear they didn’t figure in his life, he didn’t kidnap them or take them as hostages or anything.’

‘I say,’ Kenneth said disapprovingly, as if this kind of chat was going too far. They all looked at him, waiting to know what he was going to say. But he said nothing. ‘Sorry,’ he said eventually.

‘They could still get in touch,’ said Jock hopefully.

‘But who would they ring?’ Cathy asked. ‘That’s the thing that’s breaking my heart, they rang everyone, and none of us listened.’

‘They could be anywhere,’Muttie wailed.

‘They’re only nine, people will look at two kids and a dog and question them. And they’re so distinctive, the guards will find them in no time,’ Geraldine soothed them as best she could.

‘No, the guards haven’t a clue where they are, they keep asking us to think of likely places and known companions, and none of us knows anything about their lives, poor little devils. Why couldn’t they have left them here with us instead of transplanting them to The Beeches?’

‘They had to go,’ Lizzie said because she believed it.

‘And didn’t they do really fine there,’Muttie scoffed. ‘They did so fine that they ended up having to run away, come here by dead of night and take Hooves and head off the Lord knows where.’

‘Do you remember them at Marian’s wedding, they were so proud of themselves,’ Lizzie said.

‘And their speeches,’ said Muttie, blowing his nose heavily.

‘Oh, they’re not
dead
for God’s sake!’ Geraldine said. ‘Really and truly Lizzie, get a hold of yourself, those two are well able to look after themselves.’

‘No, they’re not, they’re real babies,’ Lizzie said.

‘Wherever they are now, they’re terrified,’ said Muttie.

Tom was restless. He could settle to nothing. The idea of Marcella on a London street crying in a phone box wouldn’t go away. He had been right not to speak to her; there were no more words to be said, only a circular argument going nowhere. But he wished that she hadn’t called, she must have been desperate, particularly to admit it and plead with Cathy. Marcella was always so anxious to preserve an image of herself as confident. If he had answered the phone himself, would it have been different? Perhaps he could have said in his own normal voice that it hurt him too much to talk about what could not be changed. Then she might not have been left crying in a phone box. He could concentrate on nothing because of that image. He decided to go and see his parents. JT and Maura Feather were sitting at the kitchen table playing three-handed bridge with Joe. Joe looked as if a wall had fallen on him, his left eye was closed, his lip was swollen and part of his head had been shaved where he had stitches.

‘Jesus!’ said Tom.

‘Wasn’t it dreadful?’ Maura Feather said. ‘Poor Joe reversed into a wall, and it was the direct intervention of God that he didn’t do himself any serious damage.’

Tom looked at the injuries which were obviously not the result of reversing into a wall.

‘Was it the right wall?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it was,’ Joe nodded painfully.

‘And what happens now?’ Tom asked.

‘Bills are going to be paid,’ Joe said with satisfaction.

‘At some cost, though?’ Tom looked at this brother’s injuries sympathetically.

‘No cost at all, considering,’ Joe said.

And Tom realised that Joe the businessman had suffered much more by being cheated than he had in a fist fight. His street cred was now restored, and to Joe that meant the injuries were irrelevant. His father frowned as if the conversation should change channels. So Tom told them that the twins had run away, and nobody knew where to start looking for them.

‘Those two would be well able to speak up for themselves, aren’t they Mitchells when all’s said and done,’ Maura sniffed.

I’m worried about them, Mam, they’re very odd, quaint kind of children, they take everything literally, anything could happen to them.’

‘And tell me, is Marcella still on her holiday in London?’ Maura asked.

‘It’s not a holiday, Mam, I told you that she’s got contacts there and she wants to be a model, so she has to be in London for that.’

‘And is it going well for her over there?’ JT Feather asked kindly.

‘I think so, Dad, I hear she’s doing fine.’

‘That’s funny,’ Joe said, ‘I hear the very opposite.’

‘No word?’ Tom asked.

Cathy shook her head. ‘No, and that’s two nights out on their own somewhere; it’s serious, and they all think that Walter has something to do with it, which is utter nonsense.’

‘They’d only slow him down,’ Tom agreed.

‘It’s some damn thing that they took literally, you know, like they thought that I was coming to see them on the night of the wedding, apparently I said, “after the wedding”, I didn’t mean that very day.’

‘Would Muttie have said anything to upset them?’

‘No; he was so embarrassed about having to go to hospital with his prostate, he hasn’t said anything to anyone for days.’

They went through all the things it could be; some dancing engagement they thought they had got, some school project – a quest to find another punchbowl? Those two were so strange, they could have flown to Chicago. They jointed chickens and made sauces as they talked about the children. They never got around to mentioning the hunt for the man who had stolen their belongings and vandalised their premises. Or indeed, the confusion of spending a night, however innocently, in the same room. And just because that night wasn’t mentioned, it seemed to take on a greater significance. The fact that Tom had lied to Neil on the phone. The knowledge that it had been seen and completely misconstrued by the hotel. It could easily have been one of the many things they laughed about, but because of the children they lost the moment, and now it was too late to go back to it.

Walter’s friend Derek with the sports car wouldn’t let him stay. ‘You’re too much trouble, Walter, and now you say the law is after you, I can’t afford to have any policemen poking round this flat.’ There was a fair chance they might find cocaine if they did, and black sacks of goods from the shed at The Beeches.

‘Can I leave the stuff?’

‘No, you can’t… Take it up to the market,’ Derek advised. ‘You can unload it there in no time.’

For peanuts.’

‘Well, take the peanuts then and put them on a horse,
then
you’re in the clear,’ said Derek, who wanted Walter Mitchell miles from here.

Sara was tireless in her efforts to find them; she reread her notes over and over in case they might offer a clue. She came round to Waterview to ask Neil and Cathy what kind of interests the twins had.