The Summer That Never Was (4 page)

Annie turned off the B-road between Fortford and Relton on to the gravel drive of Swainsdale Hall. Elm, sycamore and ash dotted the landscape and obscured the view of the
hall itself until the last curve, when it was revealed in all its splendour. Built of local limestone and millstone grit in the seventeenth century, the hall was a long, two-storey symmetrical stone building with a central chimneystack and stone-mullioned windows. The Dale’s leading family, the Blackwoods, had lived there until they had died out the way many old aristocratic families had died out: lack of money and no suitable heirs. Though Martin Armitage had bought the place for a song, so the stories went, the cost of upkeep was crippling, and Annie could see, as she approached, that parts of the flagstone roof were in a state of disrepair.

Annie parked in front of the hall and glanced through the slanting rain over the Dale. It was a magnificent view. Beyond the low hump of the earthworks in the lower field, an ancient Celtic defence against the invading Romans, she could see the entire green valley spread out before her, from the meandering River Swain all the way up the opposite side to the grey limestone scars that seemed to grin like a skeleton’s teeth. The dark, stubby ruins of Devraulx Abbey were visible about halfway up the opposite daleside, as was the village of Lyndgarth, with its square church tower and smoke rising from chimneys over roofs darkened by the rain.

A dog barked inside the house as Annie approached the door. More of a cat person herself, she hated the way dogs rushed up when visitors arrived and barked and jumped at you, slobbered and sniffed your crotch, created chaos in the hall while the apologetic owner tried to control the animal’s enthusiasm and explained how it really was just very friendly.

This time was no exception. However, the young woman who opened the door got a firm grip on the dog’s collar before it could drool on Annie’s skirt, and another woman appeared behind her. “Miata!” she called out. “Behave! Josie, would you take Miata to the scullery, please?”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Josie disappeared, half-dragging the frustrated Doberman along with her.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “She gets so excited when we have visitors. She’s only being friendly.”

“Miata. Nice name,” said Annie, and introduced herself.

“Thank you.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Robin Armitage. Please come in.”

Annie followed Robin down the hall and through a door on the right. The room was enormous, reminiscent of an old banquet hall, with antique furniture scattered around a beautiful central Persian rug, a grand piano and a stone fireplace bigger than Annie’s entire cottage. On the wall over the mantelpiece hung what looked to Annie’s trained eye like a genuine Matisse.

The man who had been staring out the back window over a lawn the size of a golf course turned when Annie entered. Like his wife, he looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. He introduced himself as Martin Armitage and shook her hand. His grip was firm and brief.

Martin Armitage was over six feet tall, handsome in a rugged, athletic sort of way, with his hair shaved almost to his skull, the way many footballers wore it. He was slim, long-legged and fit, as befit an ex-sportsman, and even his casual clothes, jeans and a loose hand-knit sweater, looked as if they cost more than Annie’s monthly salary. He glanced down at Annie’s boots, and she wished she’d gone for something more conservative that morning. But how was she to know?

“Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe told me about Luke,” Annie said.

“Yes.” Robin Armitage tried to smile, but it came out like the twentieth take of a commercial shoot. “Look, I’ll have Josie bring us some tea, or coffee, if you’d prefer it?”

“Tea would be fine, thanks,” said Annie, perching carefully on the edge of an antique armchair. One of the most civilized things about being a policewoman, she thought, especially working in plain clothes, was that the people you
visited–witnesses, victims and villains alike–invariably offered you some sort of refreshment. Usually tea. It was as English as fish and chips. From what she had read, or seen on television, she couldn’t imagine anything like it happening anywhere else in the world. But for all she knew, perhaps the French offered wine when a gendarme came to call.

“I know how upsetting something like this can be,” Annie began, “but in 99 per cent of cases there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

Robin raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “Do you mean that? You’re not just saying it to make us feel better?”

“It’s true. You’d be surprised how many mispers we get–sorry, that’s police talk for missing persons–and most of them turn up none the worse for wear.”

“
Most
of them?” echoed Martin Armitage.

“I’m just telling you that statistically he’s likely–”

“
Statistically?
What kind of–”

“Martin! Calm down. She’s only trying to help.” Robin turned to Annie. “I’m sorry,” she said. “but neither of us has had much sleep. Luke’s never done anything like this before, and we really are quite frantic with worry. Nothing short of seeing Luke back here safe and sound will change that. Please, tell us where you think he is.”

“I wish I could answer that, I really do,” said Annie. She took out her notebook. “Can I just get some information from you?”

Martin Armitage ran his hand over his head, sighed and flopped down on the sofa again. “Yes, of course,” he said. “And I apologize. My nerves are a bit frazzled, that’s all.” When he looked right at her, she could see the concern in his eyes, and she could also see the steely gaze of a man who usually got what he wanted. Josie came in with tea, which she served on a silver tray. Annie felt a bit embarrassed, the way she always did around servants.

Martin Armitage’s lip curled in a smile, as if he had noticed her discomfort. “A bit pretentious, isn’t it?” he said.
“I suppose you’re wondering why a dyed-in-the-wool socialist like me employs a maid? It’s not as if I don’t know how to make a cup of tea. I grew up with six brothers in a West Yorkshire mining town so small nobody even noticed when Maggie Thatcher wiped it off the face of the earth. Bread and dripping for breakfast, if you were lucky. That sort of thing. Robin here grew up on a small farm in Devon.”

And how many millions of pounds ago was that? Annie wondered, but she wasn’t here to discuss their lifestyle. “It’s none of my business,” she said. “I should imagine you’re both very busy, you can use the help.” She paused. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to stick my little finger in the air while I drink my tea.”

Martin managed a weak laugh. “I always like to dunk digestive biscuits in mine.” Then he leaned forward and became serious again. “But you’re not going to make me feel better by distracting me. What can we do? Where do we look? Where do we begin?”

“We’ll do the looking. That’s what we’re here for. When did you first start to believe something was wrong?”

Martin looked at his wife. “When was it, love? After tea, early evening?”

Robin nodded. “He’s always home for tea. When he wasn’t back by after seven o’clock and we hadn’t heard from him, we started to get worried.”

“What did you do?”

“We tried to call him on his mobile,” Martin said.

“And what happened?”

“It was turned off.”

“Then what?”

“Well, about eight o’clock,” Robin said, “Martin went looking for him.”

“Where did you look, Mr. Armitage?”

“I just drove around Eastvale. A bit aimless, really. But I had to do something. Robin stayed home in case he rang or turned up.”

“How long were you gone?”

“Not long. I was back, oh, around ten.”

Robin nodded in agreement.

“Do you have a recent photograph of Luke?” Annie asked. “Something we can circulate.”

Robin went over to one of the low, polished tables and picked up a package of prints. She thumbed through them and handed one to Annie. “This was taken at Easter. We took Luke to Paris for the holidays. Will it do?” Annie looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, thin young man, dark hair curling around his ears and brow, who looked older than his fifteen years, even to the point of having the fluffy beginnings of a goatee. He was standing by a grave in an old cemetery looking moody and contemplative, but his face was out of the shadows, and close enough to the camera to be useful for identification purposes.

“He insisted on visiting the Père Lachaise cemetery,” Robin explained. “That’s where all the famous people are buried. Chopin. Balzac. Proust. Edith Piaf. Colette. Luke’s standing by Jim Morrison’s grave there. Have you heard of Jim Morrison?”

“I’ve heard of him,” said Annie, who remembered friends of her father’s playing loud Doors records even years after Morrison’s death. “Light My Fire” and “The End” in particular had lodged themselves somewhere in her memories of those days.

“It’s funny,” said Robin, “but most of the people making pilgrimages to that grave weren’t even born when he was at the height of his popularity. Even I was just a little girl when the Doors were first big.”

That placed her in her early forties, Annie guessed, and still a striking figure. Robin Armitage’s golden tresses hung over her narrow shoulders and shone every bit as much in real life as they did in her magazine adverts for shampoo. Despite the signs of strain and worry, hardly a line marred her smooth, pale complexion. Though Robin was shorter
than Annie had imagined, her figure looked as slender as it had been in all the posters Annie had ever seen of her, and those lips that had so tantalizingly sucked the low-fat ice cream off the spoon in a famous television commercial some years ago were still as full and pink as ever. Even the beauty spot Annie had always imagined was fake was still there, at the corner of her mouth, and close up it looked real.

Yes, Robin Armitage looked every bit as good as she had twenty years ago. Annie thought she ought to hate the woman on sight, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t just because of the missing boy, either, she told herself, but she sensed something very human, very vulnerable, behind the exquisitely packaged model’s facade.

“This’ll do fine,” said Annie, slipping the photograph in her briefcase. “I’ll get it circulated as soon as I get back. What was he wearing?”

“The usual,” said Robin. “Black T-shirt and black jeans.”

“You say ‘the usual.’ Do you mean he always wears black?”

“It’s a phase,” said Martin Armitage. “Or at least that’s what his mother tells me.”

“It is, Martin. You wait; he’ll grow out of it. If we ever see him again.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Armitage. He’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’d like more information about Luke himself, anything you might know about his friends, interests or acquaintances that could help us work out where he might be. First of all, was everything all right between you? Had there been any arguments recently?”

“Not that I can think of,” Robin answered. “I mean nothing serious. Everything was fine between us. Luke had everything he wanted.”

“It’s been my experience,” said Annie, “that nobody ever has everything they want, even if someone who loves them very dearly thinks they have. Human needs are so various and so hard to define at times.”

“I didn’t only mean material things,” said Robin. “As a matter of fact, Luke isn’t much interested in the things
money can buy, except for electronic gadgets and books.” Her long-lashed blue eyes blurred with tears. “I meant that he has all the love we can give him.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Annie. “What I was thinking, though, was that maybe there was something he wanted to do that you wouldn’t let him?”

“Like what?” asked Robin.

“Something you didn’t approve of. A pop concert he wanted to go to. Friends you didn’t like him being with. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, I see what you mean. But I can’t think of anything. Can you, darling?”

Martin Armitage shook his head. “As parents go, I think we’re pretty liberal,” he said. “We realize kids grow up quickly these days. I grew up quickly, myself. And Luke’s a smart lad. I can’t think of any films I wouldn’t want him to see, except for pornography, of course. He’s also a quiet, shy sort of boy, not much of a mixer. He keeps to himself.”

“He’s very creative,” Robin added. “He loves to read and he writes stories and poems. When we were in France it was all Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire.”

Annie had heard of some of those poets through her father, had even read some of them. She thought they were a little advanced for a fifteen-year-old boy, then she remembered that Rimbaud started writing poetry at fifteen and gave it up at nineteen.

“What about girlfriends?” Annie asked.

“He never mentioned anyone,” said Robin.

“He might be embarrassed to tell you,” Annie suggested.

“I’m sure we’d have known.”

Annie changed tack and made a note to look into Luke’s love life, or lack of it, later, if necessary. “I don’t know how to put this any more diplomatically,” she said, “but I understand you’re not Luke’s biological father, Mr. Armitage?”

“True. He’s my stepson. But I’ve always thought of him as my own son. Robin and I have been married ten years now. Luke has our family name.”

“Tell me about Luke’s father, Mrs. Armitage.”

Robin glanced over at her husband.

“It’s all right, darling,” Martin Armitage said. “It doesn’t bother me if you talk about him, though I can’t quite see the point of all this.”

Robin turned back to Annie. “Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know already, given the inordinate amount of interest the gutter press took in the whole affair at the time. It’s Neil Byrd. I thought most people knew about Neil and me.”

“Oh, I know who he was and what happened. I just don’t remember the details. He was a pop singer, wasn’t he?”

“A pop singer? He’d have been disgusted to hear himself called that. He thought of himself more as a sort of modern troubadour, more of a poet than anything else.”

From singer-songwriter to footballer, Annie thought, the way Marilyn Monroe went from baseball player to playwright. There was clearly more to Robin Armitage than met the eye. “Please excuse my ignorance and refresh my memory,” she said.