The Vanishment (7 page)

The information startled me into denial.

"No. No, I don't. It is interference, you're quite right. I don't see what the hell they can be thinking about, poking their noses in like this. I've done what I can. I've been frantic, worried sick. They're not even here, they don't know what's been going on."

But they did not need to, I thought. I did not doubt that they could come up with all sorts of possibilities, enough possibilities to prompt a detective chief inspector to come down here to see for himself.

"And what exactly has been going on, Mr. Clare?"

He took a cigarette from a packet of Benson and Hedges and lit it. He neither asked permission nor offered one to me. I dislike cigarette smoke. I was asthmatic as a child. Smoke still provokes a cough in me. From time to time I use an inhaler. And in the nights, in winter, my breathing is sometimes uneven. In the nights. In winter.

"You know what's been going on. I gave a statement in St. Ives."

"I know, but I'd like it from you. Horse's mouth, as it were. In your own words. You're a writer, I believe. I don't read much myself. Don't have the time. But I expect you've got a way with words."

I related yet again the events of the past few days. Without drama, in what I believed were flat and neutral tones, or the nearest to those that I could approximate.

Raleigh listened attentively, sucking absently yet quite fiercely on his cigarette. When it came to an end, he lit a second cigarette from the butt before crushing it between his fingers and putting it in his pocket.

I finished my account. Raleigh sat for a while without speaking, smoking his cigarette, watching me.

"Mr. Clare," he said finally, "exactly what do you take me for?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Your story doesn't even begin to hang together. You now say your wife went out in her night attire—"

It was a curious phrase for him to use. Archaic.

"Probably."

"—without any money that you're aware of. And all because some woman in the pub takes it into her head to spin a yarn about a haunted house. They're two-a-penny 'round here, haunted houses. Then it takes you over two days to report your good lady missing."

"Well, I'm sorry, but that is what happened."

"You'll excuse me if I say I don't frigging believe you. Pardon my French."

He dropped the half-smoked cigarette onto the carpet and stubbed it out with his heel.

"Well, thank you, Mr. Clare," he said, standing. “I can't say but that I'm disappointed, what with you being a writer and all. I'd thought you writers were clever at telling tales. Or is that it? You think a tale that makes no sense, something nobody would think for a moment could be convincing, that a tale like that might take me in? What is it the French call that?
Faux naif
? You're a sight too complicated for the likes of me, Mr. Clare. Still, I daresay you'll tell me the truth when you've a mind to.

"In the meantime, I'll have them send over some dogs from Penzance. They're good dogs, they've got good noses. They could smell a fart behind glass in a force-ten gale, if you'll excuse the expression. We'll see if they can't pick up your wife's trail. The sergeant here will hang on till they come. Maybe he'll have that cup of tea you were telling me about earlier. He drinks Earl Grey, if you have any. If not, Lapsang will do nicely."

He glanced down at the carpet.

"Sorry about the mess," he said. "Filthy habit."

But he did not bend to pick up the butt.

As he made to go he glanced down at the table. A copy of
The Time
s was lying open at the crossword. I had completed most of it, but got stuck at 7 across, a word of ten letters with an apparently straightforward clue:
Room can supply wine
.

"Chambertin," he said, and left.

Why hadn't I thought of that?

The dogs found nothing. I gave them items from Sarah's wardrobe, and they picked up trails everywhere, all of them leading to her usual places inside the house or in the gardens. But there was no trail that led very far, and none at all on the path to the main gate: we had always gone that way by car, never on foot. Had a car come for her after all that night, unnoticed by me?

When they had finished, Raleigh returned, a cigarette in his mouth.

"Seems your wife didn't leave Petherick House after all, Mr. Clare," he said. "Leastwise, not on foot."

"But she had to," I insisted. "I would have seen a car. Or heard it. She didn't fly out."

"She might have swum," he said, glancing away toward the cliff. "We'll keep looking."

There were men in the woods, fanning out and thrashing their way through the undergrowth, a long file of them, and two dogs. They took all that afternoon and the best part of the evening. Shortly before dark, they came back empty-handed.

"This is absurd," I said for the hundredth time that day. "She's in London by now, or somewhere else. But not here. You're wasting your time. Your bloody dogs are mistaken."

"They're good dogs, Mr. Clare. The best. I'd not say a word against them dogs, not if I was you."

"What now?" I asked.

"I'd like to search the house, Mr. Clare. If you've no objection."

"The house? What on earth for?"

He shook his head.

"I don't know, to tell you the truth. But I'd like a proper look-round. While we're here."

"There's nothing," I said. "Sarah isn't here."

"Yes, I know that, Mr. Clare. But it's best to look at everything. You'll admit that's best, won't you?"

I let them look. They went through everything, into every room, but it did not take long. I thought they were going to leave empty-handed, but at the last moment Raleigh came down the stairs. There was something in his hand.

"Can you tell me how this got upstairs?" he asked.

It was Sarah's hat, or what was left of it. I must have left it in the room on the top floor where I had found it. Raleigh held it in both hands now.

"I don't know," I stumbled. "It . . . it was there on Monday night. Torn up, just like that. Sarah must have put it there herself."

"Mr. Clare, I'd like you to come to the station with me. You don't have to, not at the moment, but I'm worried about some things, and it would be a help to me if you came. We could clear some things up."

* * *

I went with him reluctantly. He did not say so, but I knew he suspected me of something, of doing away with Sarah perhaps. Possibly my in-laws had told him things, voicing old feelings, slandering me. I answered his questions as best I could. He had nothing to hold me on, of course: just a shredded hat and some inconsistencies in my story. The questioning went on until well after midnight, sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh, but it got us nowhere. We were both exhausted by then. He told me I could go home. But as I made for the door it opened and his assistant came in, the one whose name I cannot remember.

He looked nervous. In one hand he was holding something. A tape.

"I'd like you to hear this, sir," he said. "You, too, Mr. Clare," he went on, looking at me.

I sat down again. We were in an interview room, pale green walls and a smell of old sweat. A plain table held the center space. The nameless policeman put his tape into the machine on the tabletop.

"This is the recording I made earlier today," he said. "Your interview with Mr. Clare at Petherick House. I'd just started transcribing it."

He switched the machine on.

Hissing, then the sound of Raleigh's voice.

Your parents-in-law haw been in touch with their local police, Mr. Clare. . .

Then my voice, replying.

No. No, I don't. It is interference, you're quite right. . .

And what exactly has been going on, Mr. Clare?

At first, all seemed as I remember it. The interview proceeded, answer following question, question answer, all as it had done earlier that day. I could not understand what it could be that the policeman wanted us to hear. No one said anything. The policeman sat there, his eyes fixed on the recorder, his face tense. The tape turned, hissing. Now my voice, now Raleigh's. Then, barely perceptible at first, another sound began to make itself felt.

We could hear it in the background at first, like a sound very far away. I glanced at Raleigh. His face betrayed puzzlement at first, then settled into disbelief. He looked at me, as though I had the answer. I did not move. Suddenly I was very cold. A sense of horror was crawling across my skin. We listened together, and the voices continued: my voice, Raleigh's voice, and now, quite unmistakable, something else, something none of us had heard that afternoon. The sound of a small child crying loudly, its thin voice rising and falling, but growing all the time in volume until, suddenly, it drowned us out completely.

All I remember about that moment is the horror and how it took steady hold of us. Things are different now, of course. I have seen and heard more than babies crying. I know who the child was. And I know why she cried. Why she cries. But the horror remains.

Raleigh and his assistant came to the house again the next day. With them were other policemen with sophisticated recording equipment sent down early that morning from Truro; but they got nothing. Not a whisper. To this day it remains a mystery why the child's crying should have been audible on that first tape and not on any subsequent recording. And it is as much a mystery how it came to be there at all, when none of us had heard a thing that day other than our own voices. The tape had been brand new, and expert opinion agreed that there was no way in which the recording of one voice could have been superimposed on that of another, using that equipment. And yet it was there, unremovable, fixed, like a dull stain that will not be wiped out.

Raleigh's behavior toward me changed from that moment. I think he half believed what I had told him about the house being haunted.

Have I told you I sleep with the light on? Every night, summer and winter, it makes no difference. Some nights I do not sleep at all.

I want to show you something. It will only take a moment. Look, here's my room, the room I sleep or lie awake in every night. That's a photograph of Sarah on the bedside table, that's the pen I use when I write in bed, that's a book of essays I'm reading at the moment, those are the analgesics I use to deaden the pain when my back hurts, that I will use for a more serious purpose one day soon. Very soon. It's a quiet room without mirrors. Take your time. But listen— can you hear anything? If you stay the night, you'll hear more. Much more.

But no one ever stays the night.

In the end, the police reached the conclusion that Sarah had fallen—or been pushed to her death—from the cliff. It would have been high tide, around 2:00 a.m. Her body would be washed ashore in due course, and that would be that.

For my part, I thought it unlikely. I knew she would not have jumped, I did not think she would have been careless enough to stray there in the darkness, and I knew I had not pushed her. Since her disappearance, I had heard enough—though not, as yet, seen anything—in the house to convince me that something had happened there for which I could find no rational explanation, for which no rational explanation might exist. The house held a secret of some sort, and I grew more and more convinced that if only I could solve it, I might also solve the riddle of Sarah's disappearance.

During the days Raleigh and his men were in or near the house, nothing happened there. It grew very still. But I sensed that whatever lay buried there was merely biding its time, that there was more, much more, to come.

One thing did not stop: the dreams. Every night I started out on my slow climb up the stairs, and every night when I woke, I had gone a little higher. That was all that ever varied. The darkness, the silence, the brooding expectancy, the sense of malice somewhere in the house—all those remained as they had been before. And each night I woke sweating, barking like a dog without a kennel.

I stayed. What else was there to do? In a sense, where else could I have gone? I stayed and waited, though I did not know for what. I started writing again, a little at first, then vast quantities. It was my only distraction. Nothing else helped me forget, though there were times when I sat, almost thoughtless, in the study or outdoors in the garden watching the birds turn. Each day there were phone calls to make: between me and the police, between me and Sue, between me and Sarah's parents. I know no form of waiting worse than that. The anxiety is not relieved by the passage of time. Every avenue of inquiry ended in a wall. A wall in which there was no sign of any door. Or, if I am totally honest, in which the only door was a familiar one that led into an empty room on top of the house.

* * *

The second month ended. I spent as little time in the house as possible. During the days, I stayed in the garden, writing. Or I took the car and drove through the countryside for miles, without really going anywhere. Every so often, a view or a smell would awaken a memory from childhood. And then the pain of the present would overlay the memory and turn it into something else. I cannot listen to the sea now, or smell magnolia, or hear sea gulls cry without remembering that summer.

My lease at Petherick House was due to run out. Medawar, my contact at the solicitors, would not hear of an extension. I started to pack for the journey back to London. The most difficult thing was putting Sarah's clothes away in their case. She had not seemed completely gone until that moment. I took each item in turn from the wardrobe, folded it, and laid it in the suitcase, knowing they might never be taken out again.

As I folded her blue linen jacket I felt something hard in the pocket. It was a small diary, a pocket-size organizer with a leather binding for which she bought refills every year. I flicked through it casually. The last significant entry had been for the date of our departure. The rest of the pages were blank. Except for one, the twelfth of July, four days before her disappearance. In the tiny space for that day, Sarah had made an entry, just a name and a telephone number:
Miss Trevorrow: 97 Lemon Street, Truro.