Why Don’t You Come for Me (25 page)

Jo considered making an excuse for non-attendance at the garden party, but a convincing invention which would have sufficed for just about anyone else simply would not do when it came to Maisie. The actual subterfuge of absenting one’s self from Easter Bridge for the afternoon would probably be required, which was a lot of effort when all she really needed to do was avoid being there at the same time as Brian, Shelley or Gilda. She reasoned that if she simply managed to be there at a different time, it would appear as if she had accidentally missed them, rather than deliberately avoided them – and if an event was running from 2.30 p.m. until 5 p.m., wouldn’t most people opt for the middle ground and not come until at least 3 p.m., so that if she turned up at 2.30 p.m. on the dot and made an excuse about not being able to stay long, she ought to be able to make her getaway before the others got there?

Jo was surprised when she arrived outside the Perrys’ bungalow at 2.30 p.m. and found two cars already parked on the drive and Fred directing a third, windmilling his arms in the fashion beloved of elderly men who imagine that women need a dumb show from an experienced male driver in order to park a car.

The weather had necessitated holding the gathering indoors, but in spite of this, two hardy souls were padding round the garden exclaiming over the Perrys’ roses, while tilting a golf umbrella against the periodic drifts of rain. For her own part, Jo willingly accepted Fred’s exhortation to ‘go straight in’ without making any pretence of interest in horticulture.

The Perrys had pushed their furniture back and placed as many chairs as they could fit around the sides of the room. There were only three people seated inside: a couple who had positioned themselves near the fireplace, and Gilda Iceton, who was sitting alone at the opposite end of the room. Gilda’s appearance was very much that of the woman one does not readily sit next to. Her hair was drawn back into an elastic band, and she was wearing a shapeless pale blue sweatshirt which had the shadow of an old stain on the front. Her brown trousers appeared to have been designed for someone shorter and exposed wide expanses of pale unshaven leg, which vanished none too soon into ankle socks and bus-conductress shoes.

As Jo stood hesitating in the doorway Maisie breezed in from the kitchen, bearing a tray of tea. ‘Jo, lovely to see you. Why don’t you sit here, next to Gilda, as you already know each other?’

With no obvious means of escape, Jo took the chair Maisie had indicated. It was one of a quartet of dining chairs which had been pushed so close together that only her denim jeans and Gilda’s polyester trousers separated their flesh. When Jo shifted to one side, Gilda’s thighs merely seemed to overflow further on to her chair.

The trio of ladies whose car had been the subject of Fred’s needless arm-waving bobbed in out of the rain, so Maisie made some introductions – the three ladies were friends from the WI, while the couple by the fireplace were fellow members of the Lakeland Horticultural Society. ‘And this is Gilda,’ Maisie was saying, ‘our newest resident in Easter Bridge, who has very kindly said we can use her yard for overflow car-parking if we need it. Excuse me while I go and get some tea.’

Jo said hopefully, ‘Can I come and help you carry things through, Maisie?’

‘No, no. There’s only room for one at a time in my little kitchen. You stay here and get to know our new neighbour a bit better.’

Jo reddened. She had been caught off guard by the presence of Gilda, and could not bring herself to look at the woman, let alone initiate a conversation with her. After Maisie had futtered out there was an awkward silence, while everyone else waited for Jo to say something. It was eventually broken by one of the WI ladies, who addressed Gilda: ‘So, you’re a newcomer to the Easter Bridge. Where were you living before you moved here?’

‘I spent the past few years in Essex, but I’ve moved about a lot.’

‘And what brought you to Cumbria?’ Another of the ladies helped the interrogation along.

‘I wanted to move nearer to my daughter’s school. She’s a boarder at St Aelfric’s.’

‘How old is your daughter?’ asked the first WI lady.

‘She was twelve in April.’

Jo swivelled round to stare at the woman beside her. Maisie had told her that Gilda’s daughter was thirteen or fourteen.

‘The same age as your daughter would have been.’ Gilda turned to look her full in the face. ‘There was only a couple of months difference between them.’

Jo winced as if she had been slapped. Maisie chose that moment to reappear, evidently having only half heard what had been said. ‘Oh, no – Jo hasn’t got a daughter,’ she put in, clearly thinking to correct a newcomer’s minor gaffe. ‘Just a stepson, Sean.’

‘I’m sorry, I thought everyone would have known …’ Gilda left the words hanging in the air, pregnant with the implication that there was more to be said.

Jo stood up so suddenly that she almost upset a nearby pot plant. ‘I’m sorry, Maisie, but I have to go. Here –’ she fumbled in her purse and withdrew a five pound note ‘– please put this in the kitty.’

‘Jo, dear …’ Maisie was caught on the hop, encumbered with another laden tray.

As Jo all but ran down the hall she could hear Gilda saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I assumed that everyone knew.’ Outside, she ignored the curious glances of the people in the garden and Fred’s attempt to speak to her, not pausing until she had crashed in through her own front door. She knew she had made a dreadful fool of herself in taking flight. Gilda would have told them by now. Maisie Perry would know that she was the Joanne Ashton whose child had disappeared and whose husband had jumped off a cliff – and Maisie knowing was as good as taking out a full-page advertisement in the
Evening News
. You might as well hire a megaphone and tour the district.

She saw the car keys lying on the hall table and grabbed them, glimpsing Sean’s surprised face coming downstairs just as she headed back out of the door. ‘I won’t be long,’ she shouted, although she had no idea whether he heard her or not. Worse and worse, she thought as she climbed into the car, Gilda knew about her mother. Everyone from her schooldays knew about it, but by the time of Lauren’s disappearance she had been living in a different part of the country and had acquired a new name: it had been almost a decade since the death of her father briefly made the headlines, so no one had made the connection. She had been extremely lucky in that although a lot of people from her past must have recognized her in the papers and on TV, none of them had gone to the press. What happened in 1998 had been bad enough – the thinly veiled suggestions that she had made away with Lauren herself. If the wider public had known about her mother …

A car came at her as she rounded the bend below the bridge, forcing her to swerve into the side of the road, only narrowly avoiding a collision. Thank goodness there happened to be a verge just here, rather than a solid stone wall. The near miss shook her, because although the other driver had been travelling too fast, she knew that she had not been concentrating. As she steered the car back on to the road, she had to grip the wheel harder to stop her hands from shaking.

Gilda would tell them everything – she would take a malicious pleasure in it.
Oh, I’m sorry … I thought everyone knew.

Well, they did now.

She had managed to create a wide gulf between herself and her childhood, but Gilda would span the gap in the space of a few short minutes. If only Marcus could be persuaded to move away, start again somewhere; but then there was the postcard, the shells, Lauren … She had answered ‘yes’ to the card, and it was only a question of sticking it out until the next message came.

She realized that she was driving without any purpose. When she reached the main road, she turned east towards Newby Bridge. The A590 was busy with holiday traffic – Saturday was changeover day. She felt sorry for these newcomers, trying to put a brave face on it as they switched on their wipers and scanned the sky above the estuary, hoping in vain to spot a break in the clouds.

This time next week the school holidays would have begun. Sean would be at home all day, every day, lying in bed or closeted in his room with his computer games. Of course Harry would probably be around – his family generally came up in the school holidays – and then it occurred to her that Gilda’s daughter would be back too.

Was it really so outrageous – the idea that Gilda might have abducted Lauren?

‘Stop it,’ she said aloud. She knew it was her own voice, but it could have been Marcus, travelling alongside her like an extra conscience. She could almost hear him talking about doctors again – or maybe actually talking
to
a doctor. ‘My wife has developed an obsession with a woman who lives nearby. There’s a history of animosity between them, and my wife has become convinced not only that this woman is watching and following her, but even that the woman has her missing daughter.’

She drove in the direction of Bowness, but that was a mistake. The roads around Windermere crawled with holiday traffic, and there were no free parking spaces to be had. The mountain tops were hidden by low cloud. Everywhere you looked there were figures shuffling along in damp cagoules, probably wishing they were somewhere else. Café windows were misted by a combination of hot drinks and tourists’ breath, while the colourful window boxes outside bed-and-breakfasts drooped in the rain. From Windermere she drove to Ambleside, and from Ambleside back to Grizedale. The pointlessness of the excursion made her slam her hands on the steering wheel in frustration. What was the point of running away, and where did she imagine she was running to? No doubt Sean would be reporting her abrupt departure to Marcus when he arrived home, and then Marcus would want to know where she had been. She would either have to invent some lame-sounding excuse, or else admit that she had been upset, both courses leading inexorably to another episode being filed under ‘irrational behaviour’.

The car clock reminded her that it was after 4.30 p.m., which meant that Marcus should be home fairly soon. He was calling in to see his mother, but that didn’t usually delay him too much. She half expected to find his car on the drive when she reached the house, but it was not there, and when she got inside, her eye was immediately caught by the blinking light on the answering machine. She pressed the button and waited while the nasal voice of the machine informed her, ‘You have one new message. Message one.’ The voice turned into Marcus: ‘I’m calling to say I won’t be coming home tonight. My mother’s taken a turn for the worse, so I’m staying here with Sandra.’

She tried to call him on his mobile but it was switched off.

‘Sean,’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Didn’t you hear the phone earlier?’

‘Yeah. The machine got it.’

‘Why didn’t you take it?’

‘It’s never for me – and the machine has always cut in by the time I get there, anyway.’

Jo let out a small scream of exasperation. If Marcus was staying over, that must mean his mother was finally dying. For once there had been an opportunity for her to be supportive, but she had not been there for him. He had reached the answering machine instead … ‘because you were needlessly driving halfway round the South Lakes,’ an inner voice chided her. She slammed her hand down hard on the telephone table to quiet the voice, then ran up the stairs.

‘Sean,’ she said angrily, accompanying his name with a brisk rat-tat on the door.

‘Don’t come in. I’m getting changed.’

Something in his voice told her that this was not true. ‘Why?’ she called.

‘Why what?’

She could tell from his voice that he was moving across the room. ‘Why are you getting changed?’

‘I felt like it. I was trying something on.’

She knew he was lying. She had been planning to remonstrate with him about ignoring the phone, but this now became secondary to wondering what he was up to behind the bedroom door. She reached for the handle, then hesitated. There had probably been enough time for him to hide whatever it was by now. No point in provoking a scene.

‘In future, can you please answer the phone instead of letting the machine get it. That was your dad to say that your grandmother is very poorly and he won’t be able to come home tonight, so it would have been nice if he had been able to speak to one of us.’

‘Oh – OK – sorry.’ From his position behind the door, Sean listened as the stairs creaked beneath her descent. His heart was still thumping, as it had been ever since that banshee shriek from downstairs had sent him diving for his knife. Now he wondered if he would have had the guts to use it – if she had burst into the room, as he thought she was going to. He replaced it carefully in its latest hiding place, behind the box sets of
Star Wars
and
Lost
. He was a lot more careful about hiding places since that time she had almost caught him out.

It got to supper time, and she had still heard nothing further from Marcus. She made a special effort with Sean – whose grandmother was dying, after all – encouraging him to have a second helping of the chorizo and sweet potato bake, which she knew he liked.

Sean seemed willing to meet her halfway, complimenting the meal and remarking a propos of nothing in particular, ‘Some people stopped to look at your sculpture today.’

‘Really? Did they? Who?’ She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.

‘Just some family who were out walking.’

‘With children?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Boys or girls?’

Sean eyed her a little uneasily. ‘I didn’t really notice. They’d all got waterproofs on, so you could hardly tell. I saw some scouts looking at it once, too. One of them took a picture over the wall with his digital camera.’

‘Oh.’ Marcus had been right, of course. It would attract random interest from all sorts of people, not just the ones it was meant for. Sean had almost finished his second helping. She tried a different line. ‘Summer holidays next week. Do you know if Harry and his family are coming up?’

‘I think so.’

‘And now there’s that new girl, too. The one across the road, who’s at boarding school.’