Between Friends (75 page)

‘She’s not in the kitchen,’ she said baldly and her eyes clung to his, begging for something he could not give her.

‘She
must
be somewhere in the house,’ he proclaimed roughly, knowing it was not possible, praying it could be.

‘I would have met her coming in as I was coming out.’

‘Then where has she got to? The dogs were here, not far from the gate so it stands to reason she must be near. She’s too small to have gone any distance …’ His voice trailed away uncertainly and he put up a hand to shade his eyes from the sun. ‘
Beth
…
Beth
…’ he called again and Meg stood mutely and watched him, paralysed by fear and the appalling conviction that … dear God, she dare not even think it!

Will’s pale face had taken on a tinge of grey, like the colour of old cement. He began to move towards the plateau which overlooked the valley. The new grass was coming through, smooth and green, humped here and there with tussocky growth and scattered with grey pitted rock. It led gradually towards the stony path which was the only way down to the valley bottom and the fast flowing – at this time of year – river which ran there. A place so peaceful, so lovely and yet filled with peril for a small girl alone. She had been there a hundred times or more with himself and Tom, with Meg and the growing pups, but if she had gone out alone … dear God, let her be on her own … please … would not those same dogs have automatically followed her? They loved the water and the rough and tumble of climbing and jumping and racing with the child as she threw sticks for them.

He began to run, like a child with one leg in the gutter, his crippled limb slowing him, down the slope towards the path which led to the valley and when Meg would have followed him, mindless now and unable to think for herself he turned on her savagely.

‘Not with me, you fool. Split our forces and we can cover more ground. I’ll look down here and you go and circle the grounds. Look in the spinney and the fields and … for God’s sake, woman, don’t just stand there … go … go.’

They ran about frantically. Megan and Will, passing and re-passing Tom as he crouched at the garden gate calling for his baby in a plaintive voice. Annie and Edie, two elderly ladies, at first red in the face from their exertions and determination to find the child, then grey and terrified when they did not. Their old hearts pounded and their legs trembled with exhaustion as they climbed the stairs and searched attics and ran along hallways and into dust-sheeted bedrooms. They came outside when they had covered every nook and cranny in the house which could possibly
hide
a little girl and climbed over rocks and across pitilessly jagged paths and when the spring afternoon gradually faded into evening, whilst Meg put her face to the wall and wept, Will reached for the telephone.

The police constable could make neither top nor tail of the story Mrs Fraser babbled of a man who had intimidated her for years, and sent hastily for his sargeant, aware now that they were dealing with more than a child gone missing for an hour or two, and the sargeant, equally out of his depth telephoned headquarters for someone in higher authority to be summoned. The police Inspector was disbelieving though he did not show it, naturally. The poor woman was distraught, but surely, he thought privately, no one would put up with such things, if it were true, and if it was why had she not reported it to the proper authority? Certainly he would look up old police records, he told her but first would it not be more sensible to concentrate on the area about the house and grounds for surely that was a more likely place to find the little girl. Benjamin Harris, yes he had made a note of the name and he would certainly make enquiries as to his whereabouts but in the meanwhile … No, they could not search the moor at night, he explained patiently for his men would not even find their own way, let alone a small child, in the dark. The vast, unchanging stretches of moorland and high hillside in which, though they were cut in a dozen places by stony tracks, a man could be lost within hours, perhaps never to be found, were not to be treated lightly but with respect and in an orderly manner, he said kindly and as soon as day break came they would begin. Not only his own men but all the scores of farmers and labourers who lived in the area and who knew it as well as anyone, and who had volunteered. Dogs were to be used he explained, those which searched for sheep when the winter snows fell. They were being assembled now and would beat a circle outwards from ‘Hilltops’ starting at dawn. It was, luckily, a mild night, he said comfortingly and the little lass would take no harm from cold. Dressed in scarlet wool, Mrs Fraser said, so she would be warm and easy to spot and she must try and get some sleep and see to her husband who was in a terrible state, poor chap.

But the doctor ‘saw’ to Tom, giving him such a massive sedative he fell into immediate and heavy sleep and Meg wished she might do the same for the pictures in her head were too terrible to contemplate.

Three days later the police called off their search of the area in a ten mile radius of the hotel. They had covered every square inch, looking behind and under each shrub and gorse bush and rock, every stretch of bracken and heather, in every hole and gully and cleft in which a small girl could slip, and found nothing, the Inspector pityingly told the frozen-faced woman who had once been the beautiful Mrs Fraser. His men were exhausted, he explained, having spent twenty hours in each twenty-four looking for her daughter, shifts of them working round the clock with the neighbouring farmers who had neglected their own duties to search for her. It was not that they were abandoning their search, far from it. Fresh men were to be drafted but the field of their enquiries must be widened for it was clear there was … there was no more to be done around here. But Mrs Fraser was not to give up hope. No indeed. The police force of the country and of the whole of England had been alerted and if the child was to be found, they would find her. Mrs Fraser was aware, was she not, that they had done all they could in this area, he said, uncomfortable in the face of such anguish.

They sat, the four of them, stony-eyed and grey-faced, still in the same clothes they had worn three days ago and stared, not at each other for they could not bear the pain they saw there, hardly able to contain their own, but into the desolation of the future which could hold only the horror of knowing, quite positively that Benjamin Harris had gained the ultimate revenge.

They moved about the house in the next few days, unaware of the reporters at the gate or of the police constable who guarded them from their attentions. They moved from room to room, Will and Annie and Edie, mindless and staring, scarcely speaking, eating what was put before them by the kindly, damp-eyed women, farmers’ wives and neighbours who slipped in with soup or a cooked chicken or an apple pie, for Annie was beyond cooking, or even caring. The doctor sedated Tom and anxiously watched them all slip away into the dream world which is the refuge of the badly hurt and those indifferent to the one about them. Of the man Benjamin Harris, no trace could be found, the Inspector told them. He had not been heard of since he had finished his prison sentence years ago. It was believed he consorted with the criminal fraternity but as far as the police were aware he had broken no law since. They would keep searching, of course, and put out bulletins to the force all over the country to be on
the
look-out for him. Mrs Fraser must get some rest and try not to worry.

On the first day of Beth’s disappearance two of her pilots from the Hunter field had been up in their light aircraft, swooping dangerously low over the hills and peaks and moorland surrounding ‘Hilltops’ to a distance of twenty miles, looking for a splash of scarlet which might be her child, but it was as though she had vanished into the early morning mists which came before the sun, and the Inspector was of the private opinion that they were wasting their time. The little girl could not possibly have gone so far, not on her own, and if someone had taken her … well … his thoughts were black but he did not share them with the child’s mother.

Will, so strong for Tom, so dependable and four-square when it was needed in the past, could not overcome the guilt which savaged him. He believed that if he had been more vigilant, less taken up with his own pride in Tom’s recovery and the garden they were creating again for the summer, the child would still be alive. He knew she was dead, or worse, in the hands of that fiend Meg had told them about and his dreams, were filled with screams and Beth’s small face and he knew he was going the way of the man he had once safeguarded. He was helplessly drifting in a nightmare in which he could do nothing but sit and wait …

But Meg Fraser, her flying suit hanging about her painfully thin frame like an old sack, heedless of the chaos which prevailed in her home, driven by her own nightmares and not knowing what else to do, took off each day from the airfield, oblivious to the men of the press who surged about her at every appearance, flying her small airplane alone and for hours on end, day after day, only returning to re-fuel, criss-crossing systematically the skies above the Derbyshire peaks and moorland which surrounded her home, her eyes searching for that splash of scarlet among the rocks, the grey and green and brown of the empty stretches below her.

It was on the fifth day when she saw it. A speck, no more, tiny and unmoving on a steep crag, a mass of granite encircled by the sparse and tussocky grass which was all that would grow there. Sheep cropped close by and as the aircraft dropped even lower they scattered, running in waves of panic, mothers calling plaintively to their lambs to keep up. The small splash of red did not move as she put the aircraft almost onto the crag itself and for an anguished,
desolate
moment she knew it was nothing, no more than … than … dear God, what could it be so high on the peaks? No flowers of that colour grew up here. A piece of … blanket, perhaps, a rug left by picnickers but no picnickers came to this desolate part of Derbyshire. It was almost inaccessible, even by men on foot, high and dangerously steep. So what … what could it be?

Her heart was thudding in her throat, filling it, choking her as she swung her little craft round in a tight circle ready to fly over the rock again. She would go even lower this time since it no longer mattered if she smashed herself to pieces on the crags beneath. She did not care whether she lived or died without, first Martin and now Beth. When he had gone she had wanted to follow him then, but he had left her his child and from that child she had been given a new life. They had
been
her life, both of them. Not Tom, or her hotels, or the businesses she now controlled and if she died, who would grieve her and if she died
her
grief would die with her.

Putting the aircraft into a shallow dive she began her descent, aiming as slowly as she could for the crag on which the splash of colour could be seen. Down she went, closer and closer. She could feel the airplane begin to shudder in that familiar way just before a stall and she adjusted the controls slightly, feeling it respond. Nearer and nearer she got to the ground, watching, quite mesmerised, the tiny red patch come up to meet her, and when it moved and turned slightly to one side her mouth opened wide in a scream of joy and tears jetted from her eyes and her heart soared like the weightless bird she had become as she brought the aircraft out of its dive and into the incredibly beautiful blue of the skies.

‘
I CAN WALK
it from here, thanks. It’s only up at the top of this hill.’

‘Are you sure? It’d be no trouble to take you up in the waggon. You look a bit done in!’

The carter looked anxiously at his passenger who had just climbed down and was standing now in the country lane which led nowhere but to the big house at the top of the hill. It was a winding lane, he knew, and long, steep too and this chap didn’t look as though he could make it to it’s beginning, never mind its end, but the man shook his head and smiled.

‘No, thanks all the same. It was good of you to give me a lift from the station but I’ll walk this last bit. I feel in need of some fresh air and this is the best I’ve breathed for a long time. And a bit of exercise won’t hurt me, either.’

‘Well, if you’re sure.’

‘No … thank you. You’ve been most kind.’

‘Right-ho then. Good luck.’

‘Thank you.’

The carter clucked at his horse and flicked the reins across his broad back and they moved off slowly in the pale spring sunshine. The man who had alighted watched them go, then listened for a long while until the sound of the horse’s hooves had faded into the distance and were gone. There was nothing to be heard in the gentle warmth of the afternoon but the chatter of a bird in a nearby bush, the rustle of the breeze in the grasses and the high whinny of a pony from somewhere up the hill. His eyes were drawn to the flight of a darting bird with swept back wings, followed by another and he watched them go, something in his eyes and on his bemused face savouring their beauty and swiftness.

He was dressed in an assortment of clothes, a jacket and trousers which did not match, a long belted army greatcoat like that worn by officers, a checked cap of a rather foreign style and a pair of worn leather knee boots into which he had tucked the top of his
trousers
. He carried a soldier’s knapsack. His face was thin, pale and weary with strain and his hair hung over the collar of his greatcoat, dark and streaked with grey, but when he turned his step was light and there was a strange glow deep in his brown eyes as he began the long climb to the house.

She was the first person he saw, as he knew she would be for had not his eyes hungered for the sight of her for nearly five years. She was alone, as he had dreamed of her, her hands busy at some plant, her head bent, and he stopped to watch her, holding this precious, precious moment to him. She wore an outfit the colour of amber. A fluted skirt with the hem eight inches from the ground showing the lovely turn of her slim ankles, and a knitted silk jumper of the same colour which fitted to just below her hips. Her hair caught the sun and the colours in it dazzled him. A rippling foxglow, the warmth of bronze, the tawny sheen of chestnut and with a shock he realised she had cut it short for it stood about her head like a puff-ball. She turned to pick up the trowel from the grass behind her and suddenly, as though aware that she was no longer alone, she became curiously still, wary almost, and, he thought, afraid. She lifted the gardening tool in front of her, holding it as though it was a weapon and he saw her glance about her, then over her shoulder.