MISSING FROM HOME

Mary Burchell

The Collamore family had been happy and normal for years, until the
parents, tragically, decided to separate. Then unhappiness seemed to pile
up, when the elder daughter, Pat, failed to return home from a holiday.
 CHAPTER I
CLARE COLLAMORE watched the Continental boat train snaking its way
into Liverpool Street Station, and she experienced an involuntary thrill of
pleasure and excitement at the thought of seeing Pat again. She had not
actually promised to meet her daughter. In these days most seventeen-year-
old daughters liked to think they could get about the world very well on
their own. But, after the night journey from Munich and the day-long
crossing from the Hook, Pat would probably be pleased enough to find her
mother—and the car—waiting to take her the rest of the way home.

Not, Clare admitted to herself, that she was concerned only with Pat’s
reactions. What made this homecoming very special was the fact that her
daughter would be bringing with her the first personal news of Gregory
since he had walked out of the house after that last blazing row. And,
however much Clare told herself she had now put a line under her broken
marriage, personal news of Greg was not something she could contemplate
with indifference.

The train drew to a standstill and immediately doors flew open, porters
rushed into action and people began spilling out on to the platform. Clare
walked slowly down the length of the train for, since Pat was not actually
expecting her, it would be necessary to keep a sharp lookout in order not to
miss her.
 Once she thought she saw the familiar smooth, silver-blonde head. But
then the girl turned and, even at a distance, Clare saw the features were not
at all the almost classically beautiful features of her elder daughter. The girl
was quite ordinary. And in Clare’s partial view—sharpened by the three
weeks’ absence of her dear, though sometimes difficult, child—Pat was
anything but ordinary.

It was a long train and a full one. Clare quickened her pace slightly,
though still examining the members of each chattering, exclaiming,
laughing group intently. Near the end of the platform was a big crowd of
excited youngsters and she half expected to find Pat there. For, classical
though her looks might be, Pat was a sociable girl, very popular with most
of her kind.

Even here, however, there was no sign of her. Instead, Clare found herself
at the end of the train with no other face to scan.

“I must have missed her!” Disappointment and vexation were so sharp

that she said the words aloud, and a pleasant-looking man in slacks and a
pullover remarked,

“It’s easy enough on such a crowded platform. Anyone you can

describe?”

“Oh, thank you!” She was surprised and a little amused at the friendly
offer of help. “It’s my daughter, Pat. She was on her own and not actually
expecting me, so no doubt she’s really—”

“Very fair girl, with nice grey eyes? Good features. Cherry-red beret and
an off-white coat?”

“Yes, that’s Pat!” She was astonished at the detailed accuracy of the
description.

“She must be somewhere about.” The young man stretched to his

considerable height and craned his neck to see over the heads of the people
near. “We talked quite a lot together on the boat and exchanged names. But
I lost her at Harwich.”

“Then at least she got the boat all right,” exclaimed Clare. “Thank you for
that information. I’ll find her all right.”

And, much more rapidly now, she retraced her footsteps, glancing eagerly
once more at the now thinning groups, alert for the red beret and the off-
white coat rather than a hatless Pat.

But in a very few minutes she was back at the barrier again. And there
had been no sign of her daughter.

It was the most extraordinary thing! Unless, of course, there was a relief
train—or she had been unaccountably delayed at the Customs. Clare found
a responsible-looking official and enquired about relief trains.
 “Not at this time of year.” The man shook his head. “The regular service
can cope unless it’s the real tourist season. Missed someone, have you?”

“Yes, my daughter. Could she have been kept back at the Customs for any
reason?”

“Not unless she was smuggling in a big way,” the man grinned.

“No, she wouldn’t be doing that.” Clare smiled too, for though Pat had
her annoying deviations from the path of good sense, this was hardly likely
to be one of them.

“It’s easy enough to miss anyone in the first rush,” the man said
consolingly. “Was she expecting to be met?”

“No, but—”

“Well, that’s it, then! She made a quick getaway and was lucky with a
taxi.” The man lost interest in something which he probably saw repeated
every other day of the week, and now moved off. Clare hung about for a
few minutes longer—long enough for the young man who had spoken
about Pat to catch up with her again.

“Hello. You didn’t find her?”

“No.” Clare shook her head. “She must have rushed for a taxi.”
 “And how right she was!” With a laugh he indicated the long queue now
waiting for the few taxis which bothered to make for Liverpool Street
Station on a showery Sunday evening. “I’d better join that lot myself.”

“I have my car here.” Clare spoke impulsively. “I meant to collect Pat and
her luggage. Can I drive you anywhere, if it’s reasonably on my way?”

“But isn’t it bothering you?” He hesitated. “Baker Street Station, as a

matter of fact, but—”

“I practically pass it,” she assured him. And a minute or two later his
luggage was stowed away in the boot of her green Hillman and they drove
out into the deserted City streets.

“Funny how dead the place looks at the weekend,” he remarked.

“Yes.” Her thoughts were still on Pat.

“Well, tomorrow morning I’ll be back among it all.” He laughed ruefully.

“With my holiday half forgotten.”

“Do you work here, then?”

“At the top of that big building over there.” He indicated one of the
faceless blocks which disfigure London these days. “Right on the top floor.
At least the view is marvellous.”
 “It must be,” she agreed.

She was just making polite conversation, really, while at the back of her
mind an illogically keen sense of anxiety about Pat nagged away. Surely it
was quite obvious that she had just missed the child in the general rush?
There couldn’t be any other explanation. And yet she was so sure—

Greg had once declared that her certainty that she must be right about
everything was one of the things which made her impossible to live with.
No need to remember that just now. But perhaps she was being rather
stupid to suppose that she could not have been mistaken.

“You’re not still worrying about Pat, are you?” asked the young man
kindly at that point. And she was struck afresh by surprise at the way her
daughter’s near contemporaries exchanged Christian names on no more
than an hour’s acquaintanceship.

“Not really,” she assured him hastily. “It’s just that—”

“I’m sure you needn’t,” he interrupted heartily.

“She seemed to me to be very well able to look after herself.”

Clare laughed and said she supposed one could describe Pat that way and
had they talked very much?
 “Quite a bit. We had a coffee together. She said she’d been visiting—” he
stopped, looked suddenly a little embarrassed, and then added—“her
father.”

“Yes, that’s right. He lives abroad.”

She did not, naturally, offer to say why Pat’s father lived abroad and her
mother so obviously in London. Anyway, Baker Street Station now loomed
in sight and there was no need for more conversation.

He thanked her profusely, hauled his luggage out of the boot as though it
weighed no more than the odd pound or two, and finally bent down to say
through the open window,

“Thanks again. And don’t worry. You’ll find Pat sitting at home
wondering where you’ve got to.”

“I expect so.” She laughed on a note of genuine relief and drove off,
telling herself what a nice boy he was and that when she got home she
would ask Pat his name.

But when she got home Pat was not there.

The taxi must have been less lucky with the traffic than she had been,
Clare assured herself, and put on the kettle to make some tea. Half an hour
later she was telling herself that of course Pat had arrived back much too
spent-out to indulge in a taxi, and had made straight for the Underground. It
would have been a struggle with her luggage, but probably someone carried
it for her. People tended to carry things for Pat.

An hour later she had passed from anxiety to fury. Obviously the child
had gone to some friend’s house without even bothering to phone to say she
would be later than expected. It was insufferably thoughtless of her, cruelly
unthinking! The sort of thing one had no right to inflict on one’s parents.

“Greg used to say that Pat was like me,” she thought bitterly. “But I’d
never, never have worried my mother like this. I’d never have heard the last
of it if I had, either,” she reflected wryly. And for a moment she was almost
comforted by the recollection of her own slightly conventional, safe, well-
regulated home, where the behaviour of nearly everyone was soothingly—
if sometimes boringly—predictable.

Sometimes over the years she had wondered why she—the typical
product of such a home—had fallen so instantly and irretrievably in love
with Gregory Collamore. But of course the explanation was really very
simple. His slightly flamboyant good looks, his tremendous animal vitality,
his incredible capacity for seizing and holding the centre of the scene,
combined to give him the quality of sheer novelty which had captured her.

He was already a successful commercial artist when she first met him.
Her parents had not minded the “commercial” bit, but they instinctively
distrusted the word “artist” in connection with the serious business of
making a living and supporting a wife and family. However, he had been
able to demonstrate beyond question that he could give their daughter a
very reasonable degree of comfort, with the prospect of something like
luxury one day, and they had a trifle reluctantly given their consent. What
would have happened if they had not given their consent was something
Clare had never really allowed herself to consider.

Gregory had married her and swept her off to London, to live in a
charming little flat in Hampstead. They had been happy there, so radiantly,
warmly, heart-searchingly happy that even now she dared not recall those
days too clearly lest she should find herself weeping fruitlessly for them.

There the two girls had been born, within little more than a year of each
other, and there Clare had made the discovery that for her, happiness could
easily be contained between four walls, provided those she loved were with
her. She was keenly interested in Greg’s world and his work, she
entertained unpretentiously but charmingly for him, and it worried her not
at all that, while she was being a busy, happy mother to the girls, he lived
an energetic, demanding, interesting life quite separate from the parenthood
which sat lightly, if lovingly, upon him.

Most people who knew them described them as an exceptionally happy

family, and in this they were right.

It was difficult to say when the first subtle signs of change began to come.
When the girls first went to school Clare found she had more time for
herself, of course, but this was soon absorbed in their move to a much
bigger house. Greg was doing extremely well by now in his business. But,
in addition, he took to portrait painting almost as a hobby and, before he
knew where he was, he had become “fashionable,” as the term is.

He was not in the top flight of portrait painters, but his work was in
demand among stage people and near-celebrities of the day, and his social
life expanded in consequence. No one rejoiced more than Clare. No one
was prouder of him. Unless it was his two daughters who considered him,
quite simply, to be the most marvellous man in the world.

The first real flare-up had almost an element of the ridiculous in it. Clare
went with him to quite an important party, where the half social, half
professional elements made her specially eager to do him credit. Unusually
for her, she was even a little nervous about the affair, though he was a trifle
impatient when she confessed as much to him.

“There’s nothing in it. They’re all interesting and charming people. I

know them nearly all personally.”

He might, of course. But she did not, and she took the greatest pains to
look her very best. And then, by the most disastrous quirk of fate, she
arrived at the party dressed in identically the same dress as her hostess.

It was one of those occasions that can be laughed off (though with
difficulty) between friends. But between acquaintances it can be infuriating
and embarrassing in the extreme. Their hostess took it extremely well. She
was quite amusing about it all, perhaps because the dress on her looked
stunning, while on Clare it looked charming but unremarkable.

It was a miserable evening for Clare and she could hardly wait until they
were on the way home before she actually burst into tears of chagrin and
disappointment. Greg made things no better by saying, in the manner of
husbands, that “it didn’t really matter.”

“Of course it mattered!” cried Clare. “I never felt such a fool in my life.
And I suppose she felt the same.”

“I doubt it. She has remarkable poise and self-possession. That’s why it’s
going to be fun discovering the real woman behind all that when I paint her
portrait,” he added absently.

“You’re—doing her portrait?”

“Yes. But not in that dress,” Greg replied, with a flash of ill-timed
amusement.

“I should think not! Whatever you say, she probably feels as I do—that
she never wants to see that dress again.”

“Why should she? It was absolutely her dress. I thought she looked
stunning,” was the careless reply.
 Clare felt as though someone had hit her under the chin.

“Did you think—I looked stunning too?”

“You looked sweet—as usual,” he assured her airily. “But—I tell you—it
just happened to be her dress. You needn’t wear yours again, darling. I’ll
buy you a new one,” he promised with careless generosity.

“Thank you,” said Clare, for the first time in her life feeling icy fury
towards her husband. “I’ll buy my own clothes, even if they don’t always
meet with your approval.”

He was furious too then. But hotly furious. And they had the first terrific
row of their married life. There had, of course, been minor upsets and
disagreements before, but nothing at all like this.

At one point Clare thought, in stunned dismay, “We’re quarrelling about

another woman! Oh, about the stupid dress, too. But mostly because he
admits finding another woman more attractive than me—in exactly the
same dress.”

They papered over the cracks next morning, of course. They even told
each other they had both been ridiculous and such a thing would never
happen again.
 But it did. For one thing—unreasonably, she saw now—she tried to
persuade him not to do that particular portrait. And he took this as
unwarrantable interference in his professional life. Neither of them had ever
been specially touchy about this issue before, but suddenly it became an
enormous bone of contention. He declared she was getting bossy and
offensively jealous. And she thought—and unfortunately said—that there
was more to this than met the eye, and she had possibly been stupidly blind
and complacent all these years.

There were still times when everything was almost all right again and
when they almost recaptured the early happy relationship. Almost—but
never quite. The happy times grew fewer and the angry disputes more
frequent.

They managed to keep most of it away from the children, largely by a

tacit acceptance of the fact that, after all, the girls might be happier at
boarding-school. This had not been their original intention at all. But,
almost without discussing it, they came to the shared conclusion that “as
things are” it might be better so.

Once the girls had gone, Clare found time hung heavily on her hands. But
both she and Greg had lost the way back to each other by then. And,
instead of sharing his life and interests in her unexpected leisure hours, she
began to make a life of her own.
 It was not a particularly empty or over-social life. She did a certain
amount of voluntary work for charities, she became a governor of a local
boys’ school, and she even revived a modest talent for journalism to the
extent of selling the occasional article or short story in the second-line
market. But none of this had any connection with—or, indeed, interest for
—Greg. And by the time they came to the last quarrel, nearly a year ago,
they were almost strangers saying unforgivable things to each other.

That was the point at which Greg had walked out.

He made adequate—even generous—financial arrangements for her and

the girls. Then he left the country, with the avowed intention of finding
some real peace and quiet in an extended walking tour through Germany
and Austria.

It had been less difficult than she expected explaining things to Pat and
Marilyn. For one thing, Greg had already written to them, giving a brief but
admirably impartial statement of the situation. He neither accepted nor
bestowed blame. It was just “one of those things.” Both he and their
mother loved them as dearly as ever and wished the separation to disturb
them as little as possible. Inevitably, it would be with their mother that they
would continue to live, but his own ties with them remained as strong as
ever, and he hoped it would not be long before he was able to see them
again.
 Neither of the girls discussed the situation much with Clare, though she
supposed that they had discussed it a good deal between themselves. Pat
said, with an air of determined sophistication and understanding, “It’s really
just between you and Dad, isn’t it? Hardly really our business.” To which
Marilyn added, “Ye-es, I suppose that’s right.”

Clare had not been sure at the time that this was at all what Marilyn
thought. But in the end it was Pat who made the first determined move to
link up with their father again. By then it had become clear that Greg, who
had ended his tour in Garmisch, intended to go on living there indefinitely.

Pat had just left school, and she announced that, before starting any sort
of job, she wanted to go and visit her father. Clare, of course, had put no
obstacle in her path, and Pat’s letter announcing her intentions had drawn
an enthusiastic reply from her father. Three weeks ago she had gone and,
except for regular, if meagre, postcards reporting on a holiday she was
obviously greatly enjoying, there had been no real news. It was tonight—
tonight—that Clare had been waiting for, with far more eagerness than she
had admitted to herself until now. Tonight she was to receive the first real
news of Greg in nearly a year. And her maddening child lingered
somewhere with some unimportant friend, milling over details of the trip
which could not possibly matter.

She deliberately tried to stoke the fires of her anger, because they
provided the only warm protection against the chill of anxiety—rapidly
becoming black fear—which was creeping over her. She walked about the
pretty, elegant room, picking up and setting down things without looking at
them, and occasionally twitching the curtains and glancing from the
windows, although these gave no real view of the way Pat would come
when she did come.

But suppose she did not come? What then? Each time Clare reached that
horrible impasse her heart missed a frightened beat.

At eleven o’clock Marilyn came in. Though younger than Pat she often,
in her cheerful, resourceful way, would take the lead. She glanced round
now, ran her hands through her short, dark, curly hair and exclaimed,
“Where’s Pat?”

“She didn’t arrive. She wasn’t on the train.” Clare bit her lip and tried not
to communicate to her younger child the dreadful anxiety which shook her
as she voiced that inner conviction.

“She must have been,” declared Marilyn airily. “She stopped off to tell
the tale to Freda or Mrs. Little or—”

“She wasn’t on the train,” repeated Clare and, in spite of all her efforts,
she could not keep her voice from running up on to a much higher pitch
than usual, partly from fear and partly from sudden wild irritation at
Marilyn’s matter-of-fact air “I met it.”
 “Oh, did you?” Marilyn did look slightly taken aback at that. But she
recovered almost immediately, helped herself to an apple from the
sideboard and asserted, “You just missed her, I expect.”

“I didn’t miss her! Everyone keeps on making that ridiculous assertion,

and I know perfectly well—”

“Who’s ‘everyone’?” enquired Marilyn, biting into her apple. “I mean,

have you discussed it with someone?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter.” Clare dismissed that wearily. “The point is that
she wasn’t on the boat train and I—I’m worried, Marilyn. Something must
have happened.”

“What could have happened?” enquired Marilyn, with a stolidity that was
both infuriating and reassuring. So like Greg, when one came to think of it.
“She probably decided to stay a day or two longer. Why don’t you phone
Dad and—”

“There’s no possible reason to phone your father.” Clare stiffened at the

very idea. “Anyway, she was on the boat. A young man at the station said
as much.”

“A young man—?” Marilyn paused in the act of taking another bite. “Do
you mean he just came up to you and volunteered the information?”
 “No, of course not!” Rapidly, and with her mind on no more than half of
what she was saying, Clare described the chance encounter.

“Oh, I say, wasn’t that a bit suspicious?” Marilyn put down her apple as
though she had suddenly lost her appetite.

“Wasn’t what suspicious?” Clare felt a fresh stab of terror.

“The fact that he picked you out. Of all the people who got off that train,
he spoke to you about Pat. Singled you out and—”

“It was simply because he saw me looking—”

“It seems—sinister, somehow.”

“It doesn’t seem anything of the sort! There was nothing in the least
sinister about him,” retorted Clare firmly. And even to recall that very
normal, cheerful young man gave her a slight glimmer of reassurance.
“There’s no need to invent reasons for anxiety.”

“Then where is Pat?”

“I—don’t know.” Suddenly there was an obstruction in Clare’s throat,

and she had to clear it fiercely before she could go on. “I can only think that
perhaps the young man made a mistake when he thought he was describing
my Pat. It was another girl. It’s not an uncommon name. So perhaps she
was not on the boat. Perhaps she did stay a few days longer, as you
suggested. Yes—that must be it!” For a blessed moment or two she clung to
the reassurance of that thought. It was like reaching dry land after tossing in
a stormy sea.

“Well, you could check that quite easily,” Marilyn remarked.

“I don’t need to!” Clare refused even to look at the telephone. “I’m
certain that must be the explanation. Why didn’t I think of it before? I’ve
based everything on what that completely unknown young man said! It just
shows how silly it is to get so jittery.” She actually laughed in a moment of
almost hysterical relief. “If he hadn’t been so positive about meeting her on
board, I’d just have assumed she had prolonged her visit.”

“Without letting us know?” Marilyn sounded dubious.

“There’ll be a letter or a wire in the morning,” declared her mother.

“You said,” recalled Marilyn slowly, “that the young man described Pat in
some detail. The colour of her eyes, and the red beret and the off-white
coat.”

“Why—” Clare gulped—“so he did.” And suddenly she was not on dry
land after all, but being dashed to and fro once more on the breakers of
anxiety and fear.
 “You couldn’t trace him and question him, I suppose?” Marilyn
suggested. “You didn’t notice the exact address where you dropped him
off?”

“I dropped him off at Baker Street Station,” said Clare heavily, and she
rubbed her hands together as though they had gone very cold.

“Oh. That’s not much help, is it? You didn’t notice any part of the label
on his case, I suppose?”

“It wasn’t a case,” murmured Clare, as though that really mattered. “He
had a great big zipper bag and one of those duffle things. I don’t think there
was any label.”

“Well, you evidently didn’t see it if there was,” said Marilyn. Then, after
quite a long pause, “You don’t want to—ring the police?”

“N-no.” Clare spoke uncertainly. “Not yet. There must be a perfectly

ordinary explanation. She’ll surely be here any minute now.”

“Or in the morning,” suggested Marilyn.

But, at the thought of a whole night of not knowing, Clare’s resolution

suddenly collapsed. With her eyes glittering slightly, she reached for the
telephone.
 “Mother!” Marilyn sounded frightened at last. “You—you’re not going to
ring the police?”

“No.” For Clare the decision was even harder than that. “I’m going to
telephone your father.”

She dialled determinedly and then said, “Operator, I want a personal call
to Garmisch in Bavaria, please. Yes, that’s right—South Germany. Yes, a
personal call. The number is—is—”

In all these months she had never allowed herself to suppose she would
use it, and suddenly she could not remember it. But the resourceful Marilyn
scribbled it down and thrust it under her notice with surprising promptness.

Clare read it out rather unsteadily. Then, more resolutely, “And I want to
speak to Mr. Collamore, please. Yes—C for Charlie. No, he’s not Charlie.
Mr. Gregory Collamore, please. Yes, I’ll hold on.”

She sat there holding the receiver, counting the moments by the thudding
of her own heart. Once she wondered if Marilyn—gazing at her now with
widened eyes—could hear the thudding too. Then that clear, attractive,
well-known voice said almost in her ear, “Gregory Collamore speaking.”

“Go ahead, please,” said the operator.

 “Greg, it’s Clare—” Her own voice was much fainter than she had
intended and he said sharply, “Who is it? The line’s bad.”

“It’s Clare.” Her voice strengthened and her self-control returned. “It’s
Clare, speaking from home—from London, I mean. Have you got Pat still
with you?”

“Pat? No, of course not. I put her on the Hook of Holland boat train in
Munich last night. I thought she wrote you that she would be taking the day
crossing from Holland today. She ought to be with you now.”

“Well, she isn’t!” Clare’s voice broke slightly. “She just didn’t arrive. Did
she—did she say anything about breaking her journey anywhere?”

“Not a thing.” Even at that distance, she could hear the disturbed note in
his voice. “She wouldn’t have stopped off in Rotterdam to see that girl she
used to correspond with, would she?”

“Trudi? No. She saw her on the way out, you remember. And Trudi
wasn’t going to be there when she returned. Anyway, someone saw her on
the boat—I think. Greg, what was she wearing when you saw her off?”

“Wearing?” She thought he was shocked by the melodramatic

implications of that question, because he hesitated quite a long moment
before he said, “A white coat, I think. Yes. A sort of off-white travel coat,
and a red beret. She looked very pretty,” he added, in an irrelevant burst of
paternal pride.

“I’m sure she did.” It was suddenly hard to keep back the tears, and her
voice was unsteady as she went on, “Greg, I don’t want to s-sound a fool.
But I’m frightened about her.”

“Oh, nonsense!” He was almost off-hand in his reassurance immediately.

“What on earth do you suppose could happen to her? She’s a perfectly
responsible young woman by now. I found that out in the last three weeks.
You’re fussing unnecessarily—”

“I’m not fussing at all,” she interrupted, coldly and bitterly. “I’m
frightened. It’s nearly midnight. She was seen on the boat and I’m virtually
certain she was not on the train. In any case, she should have been here
hours and hours ago. You may not care what happens—”

“I care very much,” he cut in shortly.

On a frightened impulse she cried, “Oh, please don’t be angry!”

“I’m not angry.” His voice immediately became gentler, and he sounded
almost shocked at being accused of such a thing. “But you’re frightening
yourself for nothing, Clare.”
 “It’s n-not nothing that a girl of seventeen is simply hours overdue,
coming back from her first continental journey.”

“But she really might make some enjoyable digression and just send a
wire which simply hasn’t arrived yet.”

“Greg, do you really think that?” And then, as he made no answer, she
went on as reasonably as possible, “You say you saw her off personally?
Right on the train?”

“Right on to the train in Munich station,” he confirmed.

“And she didn’t say the slightest thing about varying her plans? Can you
remember what she did say? Right at the end, I mean.”

“She said—” Clare wondered if it were fancy or if she really heard him
catch his breath—“she said, ‘This time tomorrow night I’ll be home and
telling them all about it.’ ”

“She said that?” cried Clare. And this time terror fastened its talons on
her irresistibly. “Then there was no question of her not coming straight
home. That young man was right. She was on the boat.”

“What young man?”

 “Someone who spoke to me at the station. It doesn’t matter, except that
what he said confirmed the fact that she was on the boat.”

“But she wasn’t on the train? Then, Clare, she just must have missed her
connection at Harwich.”

“She couldn’t,” Clare insisted. “You just go from the boat to the Customs
and from the Customs pretty well on to the platform. Everyone except the
handful taking a local train goes automatically the same way. And if she felt
unwell—sick after the journey or something—do you suppose she wouldn’t
have phoned by now? If there wasn’t a later train—”

“Have you enquired if there is a later train—a slow train, perhaps?”

“No,” Clare admitted.

“Well, that could be the explanation, couldn’t it? Say she did feel unwell
and missed the train, she might even have to stay the night in Harwich,
mightn’t she?”

“She would have phoned,” Clare reiterated. But a chilly little ray of hope
glimmered.

“There might have been difficulties. Phone out of order or something.

Look, Clare, whatever the explanation, it must involve an unlikely
sequence of events. But these things do happen. Every parent remembers
some ghastly occasion when, for a perfectly good reason, one or other of
their children was missing. It’s hell at the time. But it’s explained away
completely later.”

“Not absolutely always,” said Clare. And in saying it, she capitulated
completely to the fear which had walked with her ever since she came into
the flat and found no Pat waiting there.

“Don’t torment yourself with melodramatic explanations,” he said firmly.

“The ordinary explanation is nearly always the right one. It will be this
time, you’ll see. Phone and enquire about later trains, Clare. And if you
draw a blank there, get hold of the Harwich Exchange and see if they can
tell you anything about hotels where she might stay for the night if
stranded. Try not to worry yourself sick. There’s bound to be an
explanation by morning. I’ll phone about nine to see how you got on.”

“And if there’s no news then?”

There was quite a long silence. Then he said, “If there’s no news then I’ll
take the midday plane home. To London, I mean.”

“Oh, Greg! Will you?” For the first time in almost a year she experienced
the wonderful feeling of being not entirely alone. But he added almost
immediately, “I’m certain it won’t be necessary, though. Good night,
Clare.” And the line went dead and he was hundreds of miles away again.
 “What did he say?” The urgency in Marilyn’s tone pierced through the
fog of her own confused thoughts, and Clare became aware of her younger
daughter again, wide-eyed and excited.

“He said that if there’s no news by morning he’ll fly home.”

“Oh, Mother, how wonderful!”

“Wonderful?” Clare passed her hands over her aching forehead. “If he
comes it will mean that almost certainly something dreadful has happened
to Pat.”

“Oh, I forgot that.” Marilyn looked startled and a good deal chastened. “I
only thought—” there was an uncharacteristic quiver in her voice—“h-how
wonderful if Dad came home.”

Clare made a helpless little gesture.

“Do you miss him so much, Marilyn dear?”

“Sometimes, yes. The way I’d miss you if you weren’t there,” said
Marilyn in a curt, hard little voice.

And Clare thought, with a stab of fresh pain, “How Greg and I have failed
them—somehow, somewhere!” Then, so that she should not linger too long
on such bitter thoughts, she embarked on a round of frustrating and finally
fruitless telephone calls.

She fairly easily elicited the information that the last train from Harwich,
slow or fast, must have arrived in London hours ago. With more difficulty
she managed at last to make contact with a sleepy night porter at the hotel
where any stranded traveller would be most likely to go. But the
information there was that the only people off the boat train were a couple
of businessmen who were catching early morning connections which had
not necessitated their going to London.

After that there was absolutely nothing else to do. Except wait—and wait
—and wait.

She sent Marilyn to bed, and was both surprised and relieved to find,
when she looked in half an hour later, that the child was fast asleep.
Perhaps it was natural at her age. Sleep made insistent claims which even
the sharpest anxiety could not resist.

For an hour longer Clare sat up, starting from her chair at the sound of
every passing car or taxi which sounded like stopping. Then, because there
was no sense in exhausting herself beyond a point of being useful on the
morrow, she went reluctantly to bed, to fall into a series of fitful dozes,
from which she awoke from time to time with a sense of infinite
foreboding.
 Towards morning she slept heavily, and woke to find Marilyn at her
bedside, with a cup of tea and an air of anxious compassion.

“What is it?” Clare started up. “Is there any news?”

“Not yet, Mother. But I’m absolutely sure there’s going to be good news
soon,” Marilyn asserted. “I’ve got a—a sort of hunch about it. Drink your
tea and keep up your spirits. Now it’s daytime and everything’s moving
again we’re bound to get some news.” Her warm optimism was indefinably
cheering and Clare smiled at her.

“Thank you, darling. You’re a real comfort.” Marilyn looked pleased and,
when the telephone rang, she dashed for it.

“No, Dad, it’s me. Marilyn,” Clare heard her say. “No, not a word. No,
there wasn’t any other train, and she isn’t at the most obvious hotel.—Well,
yes, I think you should. It’s pretty tough on Mum, handling this business
alone, isn’t it?”

By then Clare was at her daughter’s elbow, and Marilyn handed over the
telephone immediately.

From Greg’s voice it sounded as though his night had been no more
restful than hers. His tone was rough with anxiety and the effort of hiding
it, and he asked very few questions before he said abruptly, “I’ll fly over
today. If I can get a seat on the eleven-thirty plane I should be with you by
the middle of the afternoon.”

In all her anxiety she still felt dizzy at the thought. And then half afraid of
seeming to force the issue.

“Greg, it doesn’t seem something of an imposition, does it? I mean—I’m

not panicking unnecessarily. I know everything could be all right even now.
But she’s little more than a schoolgirl, really, and—”

“She’s my child as well as yours, isn’t she?” he interrupted shortly.

“You’re not the only one who’s finding it difficult not to panic.”

Then either he rang off or was cut off, and Marilyn was saying with
barely concealed eagerness, “Is he really coming?”

“Yes, he’s coming. He should be here—” she swallowed—“this

afternoon. But there must be something—something we can do before
then.”

“We might phone the various friends?” suggested Marilyn doubtfully.

“See if she wrote to anyone about a possible change of plans.”

“We could,” Clare agreed. “But I don’t think it would be much good.
When your father last spoke to her, at the start of her journey, it was
evidently her intention to come straight home. Any change of—of plan,
voluntary or involuntary, must have happened after that. If only there were
someone who spoke to her later!”

“The young man on the boat, for instance? Didn’t he say anything about
where he lived?”

“Apart from the fact that he was catching a train from Baker Street, no.
Except—oh!” Suddenly, like a light flashing on in a dark room, Clare found
herself recalling that casual reference to the office where he worked. “I
know where to find him! He said he worked on the top floor of one of those
horrible blocks of offices in the City. He pointed out the very one. I could
go there—now! Or as soon as we’ve had breakfast and allowed him time to
get there. Why didn’t I think of it before? Oh, at least it’s a frail, frail link
with Pat.”

“But you don’t know his name.” Suddenly, Marilyn seemed oddly
unenthusiastic. “Nor the actual firm he works for—unless they occupy the
whole floor. How can you possible enquire for him? You can’t just describe
him and—”

“If I have to describe him to everyone in that block I’ll find him,” retorted
her mother grimly. “Oh, if only, only he can throw some light on this
horrible mystery! I almost wish I’d done that now before I troubled Greg.
There might not be any real need for him to come if—”
 “There’s every reason for him to come!” cried Marilyn, her voice shrill
with indignant protest. “This young man’s nothing to us, while Dad is Pat’s
father. He has every right to be here if something is wrong.”

“I wasn’t questioning his right, Mari dear.” Clare spoke gently, because
she saw her younger daughter was suddenly near to excited tears. “It was
only that I didn’t want to bring him here unnecessarily. Perhaps to look as
though there—there were some attempt to get him home on false
pretences.”

“He wasn’t even thinking of such a thing, I’m sure.” Marilyn spoke
sulkily. “I don’t know why you want to keep him away.”

“I don’t, child! If he wants to come—”

She stopped. How on earth was one to try to explain the inexplicable
now? Did the child think that she was the one to force the separation?—Not
that Greg had been exactly that either. It was just a mutual arrangement to
satisfy them both. If “satisfy” was the word.

“Well, anyway, Dad’s coming,” said Marilyn, and expelled her breath in a
long sigh of something between relief and defiance. “And I shouldn’t have
thought there was any need to follow up this young man.”

“But of course there is! Anything which could give us the faintest hint of
explanation is worth following. You must see that.”
 Marilyn did. And as swiftly as she had become obstructive before she
became compliant now.

“All right, of course. You go, Mother. I’m not being very sensible. I
suppose I’m jittery too. But you go and find this young man. And while
you’re away, I have to go out and—”

“You can’t go out, darling! Someone will have to be here in case any
phone message comes through. It’s absolutely vital,” Clare insisted as she
saw Marilyn’s face go blank with some sort of unexplained dismay. “What
was it you wanted to do?”

“Well—” Marilyn looked suddenly confused—“it doesn’t matter. It’ll

wait, I guess. It’s not as important as—” she gulped—“getting news of Pat.
I’ll go this afternoon. You’ll be staying in then because of Dad’s coming,
won’t you?”

“Ye—es.” There was the faintest hesitation in Clare’s assent. Somehow,

she had not thought of having to face Greg alone in the first five minutes.
She had visualised a cheerful, talkative, affectionate Marilyn helping to
gloss over that difficult occasion. But, almost as though she sensed the
unworthy cowardice of that thought, Marilyn went on,

“I’m sure you’d both rather have me out of the way in the first hour or so.
I do understand! And now you go off, Mum, and hunt down your young
man. I’ll look after everything here.”
 With another of those swift, youthful changes of mood, she seemed to
take over the direction of events, polishing her mother’s shoes, brushing her
coat, finding her car keys, and finally almost hustling her on her way with a
great display of affectionate energy.

Only when she had seen the lift door close and heard the whine of the
descending lift did Marilyn re-enter the flat, shut the front door and lean
against it in a moment of almost motionless reaction.

Then, deliberately, she went over to the telephone and dialled. She
hummed a little nervously as she waited and, although she knew she was
alone in the flat, she spoke softly when a voice answered.

“Could I speak to Miss Foster, please? Yes—Miss Foster. She checked in

last night, I think.”

There was another pause, during which she hummed even more
nervously. Then she gave a little gasp of delighted relief at the sound of a
familiar voice.

“Pat?” she said. “It’s Marilyn. I can’t come until this afternoon. But it’s
worked all right, though it was rather more harrowing than I expected. Still,
it’s in the best of causes. Dad’s catching a plane from Munich in an hour or
two.”
 CHAPTER II
“I’M trying to trace someone who works on the top floor of this building
—” For the third time that morning, Clare Collamore forced a pleasant
smile to her now pale lips and tried to look as though her enquiry were a
perfectly normal one. “He—”

“What’s the name, please?” The bright, indifferent little girl at the enquiry
desk of Morgan & Petersfield, Publicity Agents, turned from her
switchboard and poised a pencil above her pad.

“That’s just it—I don’t know his name,” Clare explained. Then she
hurried on, trying to ignore the girl’s blank stare of astonishment, “He’s a
tall young man and this would be his first day back after a holiday abroad.”

“You’re sure he works here?” The girl spoke briskly.

“I think he must. I’ve tried the other two firms on this floor and he
doesn’t seem to be there.”

“But you know it’s this floor?”

“Yes. He told me he worked on the top floor of this building. Doesn’t it

ring any bell with you at all?—a tall young man. Early or middle twenties, I
should think. And just back from a continental holiday. He shouldn’t be all
that difficult to trace!”
 “There are over a hundred people on this staff.”

The girl bridled slightly, as though her efficiency had been called in
question. “I don’t know the half of them by sight. I’ve only been here a
month. Is he on the illustrating side? or copy? or photographic—or what?”

“I don’t know anything about him.” Like someone in a bad dream, Clare
found herself on the familiar treadmill of words and suddenly, to her
horror, she knew she was very near tears. “He met my daughter on the boat
yesterday. And she—she’s disappeared and we’re trying to trace her.
There’s just a hope that he might know something—remember something
that would help us—” She stopped, unable to go on.

“Oh, I say, I’m sorry.” Suddenly the rather pert, uncaring little girl was
looking at her with real compassion from under her strange erection of fair
hair. “Wait a minute. I’ll see if we can help you.”

She turned to her switchboard and energetically began to pull out plugs
and push others in. Then she said into the mouthpiece which hung round
her neck.

“Personnel Department? Is Sadie there?—Look, Sadie, can you tell me

who’s back from leave today? No, not just a day’s leave. A real holiday.
No, none of the girls. One of the men.—What? Well, I just want to know.
It’s important.—Who? No, I don’t know him. Is he a tall chap?—No, don’t
be silly. There’s a lady here wants him. In Mr. Cartin’s department, you
say? Well, that’ll be two-one-three. Thanks a lot.

“I think I’ve got him.” She spoke encouragingly over her shoulder to
Clare. “Why don’t you sit down? You look all in.”

Clare sank on to a nearby chair and watched some more sleight of hand
with the plugs.

“Two-one-three?” she heard the brisk voice enquiring. “Is Mr. Penrose
there, please?” And then, “Mr. Penrose, there’s a lady in the outer office
wants to speak to you.—Just a minute.” The girl looked over her shoulder
again at Clare. “What’s the name?”

“Mrs. Collamore. But he won’t know it. Say I gave him a lift to Baker
Street station last night.” She heard this piece of information being relayed.
And then the girl said, “It’s all right. He’s coming.” Two minutes later
Clare’s friend of the previous evening entered from an inner office, looking
puzzled, but smiling slightly as he came forward to greet her. “Hello, Mrs.
—Collamore. What can I do for you?” She was not surprised that there was
a slight air of reservation in his manner. He must be wondering why on
earth a virtual stranger should have followed him up so determinedly.

“I’m so terribly sorry to come bothering you at work.” Her tone was
breathless and apologetic. “But I didn’t know where else to find you, and I
thought you might be able to help me—us. It’s about Pat. She’s missing
and—”

“Missing?” Blessedly he seemed to take in the full gravity of that

immediately, for he said quickly, “Come with me.” And ushered her
through a door, along a short passage and into a small office-studio, where
there was a desk, a drawing-board on an easel, a couple of hard chairs and
very little else.

“Sit down,” he said. “Take your time. And tell me what has happened.”

In spite of his youth, there was something infinitely reassuring about his
air of friendly authority. And, for the first time that morning, Clare felt the
tight band round her heart relax and her breath come more easily. At first
jerkily, and then more calmly, she explained to him what had happened.

“So, you see, she was not on the train. I never quite thought she was. But
she was certainly on the boat if your information is correct. You say she
told you her name was Pat?”

“Quite by chance—yes. Someone happened to call the name to another

girl and she glanced up while we were talking and then, as she turned back
to me, she said, ‘I thought for a moment someone was calling me. That’s
my name.’ As I told you, the Pat I talked to was fair and good-looking and
wore a red beret and a sort of white travelling coat.—And there’s another
thing I remember now,” he added suddenly, “she wore a rather unusual
bracelet. Like a charm bracelet, only instead of charms there were different
semi-precious stones.”

“Then there’s no doubt about it!” Clare exclaimed. “I gave her that
bracelet myself. It was a birthday present, only a couple of months ago. But
then what happened to her after she landed?—If she did land, that is!” A
completely new and horrifying possibility suddenly presented itself and
Clare’s eyes went wide and dark.

“No question about that, Mrs. Collamore.” The young man was emphatic.
“If you’re tormenting yourself with the idea that she might have fallen
overboard you can dismiss that at once. It was a crowded boat. No one
could have been out of sight of at least a dozen other people for any
moment of the crossing. Besides which, I was talking to her myself almost
up to the moment of berthing.”

“Oh, thank you!” She gave him a pale, unsteady little smile. “You’re a
most reassuring person, Mr.—Mr.—”

“Penrose. Jerry Penrose is my name. And I only wish I could remember

something that would reassure you entirely.” He frowned with anxious
concentration.

“There wasn’t anything she said which might give one a clue?” Clare
looked at him as though she might almost will him to remember some vital
detail. “Can you remember what you talked about?”
 “Mostly our respective holidays, I think. I’d been in the Tyrol and she
said she’d been in Garmisch with her father.”

“Yes. We’re separated.” Clare told him briefly. “Did she—did she say
anything to suggest that the situation distressed her deeply? I’m sorry to
have to ask a virtual stranger this. But one must follow every possible line
of enquiry.”

“She didn’t give me that impression at all,” was the frank reply. “She said
her father was an artist—”

“Yes. He’s Gregory Collamore.”

“Is he?” The young man was impressed. People tended to be impressed
when Greg was mentioned. “I did wonder when you mentioned the name
Collamore. I was interested when she said her father was an artist, because
commercial art is my own line of country.” He made a vaguely explanatory
gesture towards the easel. “But we talked in the most general way. I offered
to see about her luggage, along with my own, because we were nearly in
then, you know. But she said she would be all right. She was a little off-
brushing, in a way, to tell the truth.”

“In what way?” enquired Clare quickly.

“Oh, well—” he laughed and flushed slightly. “I was thinking I’d like to
see more of her. She’d made a good deal of an impression on me, you
might say,” he admitted with engaging candour. “And I said something
about perhaps seeing her on the train on the way up to London. But she
said a bit coolly, ‘I think not,’ and—”

“She said that?” Clare stared at him. “But you never told me that before!”

“Why should I?” He looked a good deal surprised. “I suppose it was just
her way of saying she didn’t want to take things further.”

“She didn’t necessarily mean that at all! Don’t you see?—she might have
meant you wouldn’t see her on the London train because she wouldn’t be
there. Think!” Clare pressed him. “From the way she said it, could she have
meant that?”

“I—don’t know.” Jerry Penrose looked taken aback. “Yes, I suppose she
could. Though that doesn’t really get us much nearer an explanation of her
disappearance, does it?”

“At least it suggests that—” Clare swallowed—“she went of her own free
will. I simply can’t imagine why she should or what could induce her to
stay away from home and terrify us all like this. There wasn’t—” again she
hesitated painfully, for it seemed monstrous to discuss Pat so intimately
with a stranger—“there wasn’t anyone else travelling with her, I suppose?”

“Not as far as I could see. Certainly she gave the impression of being on
her own while I was talking to her.”
 “Well, at least there’s a crumb or two of comfort in what you have told
me, and I’m terribly grateful and mustn’t take up any more of your time.”
Clare gave him her really beautiful smile, at which he exclaimed fervently,

“I only wish I could have helped you more. You don’t feel like going to
the police, I suppose?”

“Only as a last resort. Especially now there’s a strong possibility that she
has gone intentionally. In any case, I’ll leave that decision to my husband,
when he comes this afternoon.”

“Oh, he’s coming home? I’m glad!”

“How nice of you.” Clare looked faintly amused. “Why?”

“Because I think it’s such a ghastly thing for any woman to have to
handle on her own. Her husband should be there at such a time. At least—
well, I’m sorry. It’s not my business, of course.” He looked rather taken
aback at his own outburst.

“Don’t apologise. You don’t know how much you’ve helped me. Do you
mind if I give you our phone number, and then if you happen to recollect
anything later—anything at all—I’d be so grateful if you would ring.”

“Yes, of course.” He reached into a side drawer of his desk and after a bit
of rummaging produced a slightly battered card. “And that’s my home
address if you need me at any time.”

She took the address gratefully and gave him her own. Then, with a
touchingly courteous air of concern, he accompanied her to the lift and saw
her on her way.

All the way home Clare was vaguely comforted by the recollection of his
smile, which had something vaguely familiar about it. And it was not until
she actually arrived at her own front door that she realised, with a slight
sense of shock, that it reminded her of Greg when she had first met him.

Marilyn greeted her eagerly with the news that her father had telephoned
from Munich airport to say that he had secured a seat on the plane and
would be at the flat by the late afternoon.

“I wish you could be here too, when he arrives, Marilyn,” Clare

exclaimed.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t, Mother.” Her youngest daughter assumed her
most mulish expression. “And anyway, I don’t think I should be. Of course,
it’s better for you two to meet on your own at first. Anyone else would be a
—an intrusion. And I’m not going to be that,” she concluded with obstinate
virtue. “Now tell me what happened. Did you find your young man?”

“Yes. His name’s Jerry Penrose.” And, nothing loath, Clare gave a
detailed account of her meeting with him.
 Marilyn listened with the utmost attention, though there was a slight,
nervous fluttering of her eyelashes when Clare advanced the theory that Pat
was staying away of her own accord.

“Why should she?” Marilyn countered quickly.

“I don’t know! But then I begin to feel I don’t know anything about my
own child.” Clare exclaimed unhappily. “It’s like trying to decide how a
stranger might have acted. At one moment I cling to the idea that she must
be staying away voluntarily because any other explanation is insupportable.
And then I’m stunned by the thought that there is something so utterly
secret in Pat’s make-up that neither her father nor I—nor even you—” she
stared unhappily at her younger daughter—“can fathom it.”

“Oh, well—” Marilyn shifted a little uneasily—“everyone has something

in them that’s a mystery to everyone else. My guess is that she’ll write
soon. I’m sure she will.”

“I only hope so,” sighed Clare. And then, as her daughter glanced at the
clock and then suddenly rushed to fetch a coat and scarf—“What time will
you be in, Mari? And where are you going, incidentally?”

“To see a girl in my class who—who’s in hospital. I won’t be late,

Mother, I promise. You’ve enough to worry you without that. I’ll be back
by six at the latest.”
 And Marilyn gave her mother such a warm, almost remorseful hug that
Clare smiled and said, “It’s all right, darling. Don’t reproach yourself. I
wouldn’t want you to let a sick friend down.”

She would have been surprised to know that her child scrubbed away a
guilty tear as she rushed to the lift. And still more so if she could have seen
her leap into a taxi and say, “Fenchurch Street station, please, and quickly.
I’ve a train to catch.”

Fortunately the driver was co-operative and the traffic luck was with
them. Marilyn arrived at the station in time to catch the Westcliff train with
three minutes to spare. But, though she flung herself back in her corner seat
with a sigh of relief, she did not really relax throughout the journey.

Arrived at her journey’s end, she took another taxi, though she counted
her money anxiously and muttered to herself during the short drive. But
when she was finally set down before an inconspicuous-looking private
hotel in a quiet side street, her colour was up and her eyes sparkling.

“Miss Foster is expecting me,” she stated firmly at the enquiry desk. “It’s
Room Fourteen, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You can go straight up,” she was told. And, disdaining the
lift, she ran quickly up to the first floor and tapped urgently on the door of
Room Fourteen.
 “Come in!” The voice which replied was both eager and anxious.

Marilyn went in, closed the door behind her and leant against it and faced
her sister.

“It’s all much, much more difficult than we ever imagined,” she
announced. And suddenly she began to cry in a rather scared way.

“Oh, Mari—” The girl who rushed to comfort her was almost delicately
blonde in colouring, but there was an air of strength and resolution about
her which belied any suggestion of fragility. “I’m sorry, darling!

It’s almost worse for you than for me in some ways. But, as you said
yourself, it’s in the best of causes.”

“I know.” Marilyn gulped and recovered herself. “But Mother’s so

wretched and scared. She imagines you either cut up in pieces in a sack or
eloping with the wrong sort of man. It sounded almost easy—almost a lark
—when we first discussed it—”

“I never thought of it as a lark,” Pat interrupted sombrely.

“Well, I did,” said the younger girl a little fretfully. “I didn’t realise there
would be so many hours to fill in. Waiting and telling fibs and pretending
to be as anxious as Mother herself when all the time I know it’s all right.
Somehow—” she sighed—“I imagined it all happening quickly, and our
getting to the reconciliation point in no time.”

“It is happening quickly. You said yourself that Dad’s agreed to come
home today if he could get on a plane. What could be quicker than that?”

“Well, that’s true.” Marilyn drew a rather quivering sigh. “And he did get
a seat. He phoned from Munich to say so, after I spoke to you this morning.
He should be arriving home—” she consulted her watch—“in about an
hour.”

“Well, that’s fine!” The older girl looked relieved. “They can have an
emotional meeting all on their own. There’s nothing like a shared anxiety to
draw people together. It makes them remember how much they have in
common, and not so much about what divides them.”

“I suppose it does,” Marilyn agreed dubiously. “But anyway, Pat, you

must send a letter to Mother right away, telling her you’re safe and that
there’s no need to worry.”

“You don’t think that might send Dad back to Munich?”

“No, of course not! Once he has come, he can’t very well go away again
until the mystery’s solved. And anyway, if you don’t quiet at least some of
their fears soon they’ll go to the police. I had some difficulty in stopping
Mother last night.”
 “How did you do it?” asked Pat curiously.

“Well, I was really rather smart about it.” Marilyn cheered up somewhat
at the recollection. “I remembered they always say that attack is the best
form of defence, so I made the suggestion myself—forestalled her, you
know. But I made it in a sort of ‘I-suppose-you-wouldn’t-think-of-such-a-
thing’ tone of voice. And sure enough, she decided she wouldn’t think of
such a thing. Not until she had consulted Dad, anyway. That’s why she
phoned him so quickly. But I’m sure I couldn’t hold them much longer.”

“No—I see.” Pat bit her lip thoughtfully.

“Why shouldn’t you reassure them a little, anyway?” protested Marilyn.

“There’ll be plenty to keep Dad here, now that we’ve got him home. I’ll
make a fuss of him, and he’ll be anxious enough about you anyway, and
you’ve no idea how appealing Mother is when she’s scared. There’s
nothing to take him back to Munich while all that’s happening!”

“Unfortunately,” replied Pat, frowning, “there is.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a complication we hadn’t thought of. There’s another woman.”

“After Dad, you mean?” Marilyn was aghast. “Oh, what a dreadful bind it
is having attractive parents! Is it serious?”
 “She is. In fact, I’d say she’s hellbent on getting him and, if there’d been
an actual divorce, I wouldn’t have put it past her to have nailed him by
now.”

“Then he’s fond of her too, you mean?”

“He’s flattered. Men always are when a good-looking woman trains her
sights on them,” Pat declared knowledgeably. “If she’d left him alone he
probably wouldn’t have noticed her all that much. But as it is—” she broke
off and shrugged.

“What was her reaction to you when you arrived?” Marilyn enquired
curiously.

“She detested me on sight. Naturally,” said Pat with some satisfaction.

“Once she was silly enough to show the fact, and that riled Dad. Which
shows that she hasn’t got a full hold on him. Otherwise he’d have been wild
with me. But I acted all innocent and bewildered, and so he was very curt
with her.”

“I say, you have learned a lot in three weeks, haven’t you?” Marilyn
sounded half admiring, half critical.

“Not all in the last three weeks,” her sister replied. “But there’s one thing,
Mari. We can’t afford to let up on this. We’ve got stiff competition from
Mrs. Curtiss.”
 “Is that her name?”

“Yes. Linda Curtiss. She says she’s a widow,” said Pat in a tone that
would have led anyone to question that. “But if we close the family ranks
we ought to be a match for her. You must keep up the parental anxiety
about me, Mari, even after they get my letter. We don’t want them in real
misery, of course. But we do want them sharing an anxiety which forces
them to see each other a lot.”

“I’ll do my best.” Marilyn sighed. “But it isn’t easy.”

“None of it’s easy,” retorted her sister. “It isn’t easy for me either. I’m
sick of this place already.”

“Oh, that reminds me! I’m afraid you’ll have to move,” Marilyn said. “If
they start hunting around for you it will be in the direction of the Essex
coast. Mother knows you didn’t get the London train last night, and there
can’t be many places you could have gone to straight from Harwich.”

“How does Mother know I didn’t get the London train?”

“For one thing, she met it. And it’s no good trying to convince her that
you could have slipped away in a taxi without her seeing you, because she’s
dug up some young man you talked to on the boat. He spoke to her at the
station, and even thoughtfully left his office address with her. You seem to
have made a massive impression on him. He was able to describe you right
down to the colour of your eyes and the bracelet you were wearing.”
Marilyn stared thoughtfully at her sister, who had flushed a delicate and
extremely becoming pink.

“Oh, I know who you mean. Jerry Someone. Nice. I’d have liked to see
more of him if it had been possible. As it was, I had to be a bit off-putting,
of course.”

“Well, you didn’t put him off enough, it seems,”

Marilyn stated candidly. “He and Mother got together this morning, and he
says you brushed him off when he suggested seeing you on the train, and
they’ve both now come to the conclusion that what you meant was that you
wouldn’t be on the train. You can depend upon it that if a search is started it
will be started somewhere around here. No, you’ll have to move.”

“But where shall I go?” Suddenly it was Pat who looked young and
bewildered. “It was so lucky that you and I could arrange on this address.
It’s off the beaten track and no one could associate us with it, whereas—”

“It’s pretty inaccessible for me,” interrupted Marilyn gloomily. “Frankly,

I think you’d be just as safe in London. It’s large enough, goodness knows.”

“But I might run into them—or someone who knows them—almost

anywhere!”
 “Not if you were careful. Certainly not for a day or two, while we decide
what’s best to do. Provided you don’t stand under the clock at Selfridges, or
at Swan and Edgar’s corner or any place like that, you should be perfectly
all right.”

“It’s a frightful risk,” said Pat.

“So’s everything,” retorted Marilyn crossly. “If they once get a line on a
smaller place it’s much more difficult to hide, whereas if you’re in the
biggest city in the world it’s pretty easy to get lost. That’s what murderers
do.”

“Well, I’m not a murderer,” said Pat, who was also getting cross. “And I
don’t want—”

“There’s no time to argue.” Marilyn glanced at her watch. “I must go if

I’m to catch my train, and if I don’t they’ll have a search-party out after me.
Pat, I know where you can go! You remember that private hotel where you
and I went and had tea with Miss—what was her name? She was our
history teacher in our second year at school, and she went to New Zealand.
Mackay! That was it.”

“Yes, I remember. In Holland Park—on a corner.” Pat had caught

something of her sister’s eagerness. “It’s true it would be wonderful to be
back in London—and it’s far enough away from home to be safe, surely.
What was it called?”
 “I’m trying to think. Something to do with fish.”

“Nothing whatever to do with fish. It was—Chip—Chipping—No,

Chipperfield Hotel.”

“Well, that’s what I mean,” said Marilyn illogically. “There was a big
garage opposite. One can’t miss it. It couldn’t have been expensive. It
wasn’t that sort of place. Which reminds me—how are you off for money?”

“Low,” said Pat succinctly. “Have you brought me any?”

“Ten pounds.” Marilyn counted out the notes carefully. “I’ll bring some
more when I come to the Chipperfield on Wednesday. I think I should be
able to manage Wednesday all right.”

“I’ll move tomorrow.” Pat suddenly seemed almost elated at the prospect.
“I’m sure you’re right, now I think it over. And that’s a good suggestion of
yours. Just the right sort of place. They’d never look for me there.”

The girls hugged each other, partly from a sense of mutual congratulation
and partly from a shared need of moral support.

“And you’ll be sure to write that letter, won’t you?” Marilyn said, as she
gathered up her belongings.
 “Yes. And I’ll post it here,” replied Pat. “Because I’ll be gone by the time
they read the postmark.”

“I want them to get it first thing in the morning!”

“They will. And I shall be gone first thing in the morning,” Pat assured
her.

“All right.” Marilyn managed to give a cheerful smile as she hurried off,
but her heart felt uncomfortably heavy, for there was something very dreary
about leaving Pat to the loneliness of the little hotel bedroom. Only by
forcing herself to think of the meeting which must even now be taking
place between her parents did she contrive to raise her spirits. For, as she
reminded herself for the twentieth time, all this was in the best of causes.

Could she have witnessed the meeting she might not have found it so
entirely reassuring. For one thing, two people who have loved each other,
left each other, and been brought forcibly together again by outside events
are hardly likely to be at their most engaging best.

“I look quite plain,” Clare thought, catching sight of herself in the mirror
as she nervously paced the room in that last quarter of an hour before he
came. “I look every day of my age. He’ll notice that. Greg always noticed
things like that. He loved people to be vital and zestful and—and
interesting. I don’t look in the remotest degree interesting. I look a tired,
scared middle-aged woman who hasn’t slept well. Which is just what I
am!”

She went through to her bedroom. The bedroom where, even now, it
sometimes gave her a sickening shock to see only the one single bed. And,
sitting down at the dressing-table, she nervously rubbed a little colour into
her cheeks, put on more lipstick than she usually required, and added a
dusting of powder.

“It only makes me look even more hollow-eyed,” she said aloud. “And
what does it matter, anyway? Pat is missing, and here I am making up my
face for a man who walked out on me nearly a year ago.” Because she had
learned to be hard with herself, she saw only the absurdity of what she was
doing and none of the pathos. She would disgustedly have rubbed away the
results of her handiwork if the front door bell had not rung at that moment.

Her heart gave a thump that hurt almost physically. Then, deliberately
pulling herself together and forcing herself to breathe evenly, she went to
open the door.

At first she thought the Greg who stood outside had not changed at all.
But as he came in, and the light was on him instead of behind him, she saw
with a slight shock that there was quite a lot of grey in his hair. If anything,
it gave him an even more distinguished appearance. But it was there.
 “Clare—” unexpectedly he brushed a light kiss across her cheek—“is
there any more news?”

“Nothing really specific.” There had not been a chance to return his kiss,
and for this she was obscurely sorry. “I traced up the young man I
mentioned. The one who talked to her on the boat. He had a few crumbs of
information.”

They had come into the sitting-room by now and he glanced round as
though he recognised certain features with pleasure. And he said,
irrelevantly, “You’ve changed things round a bit.”

“Yes, of course.” That was colder and more emphatic than she had
intended, but then she had been embarrassed in that moment to realise how
much else had been “changed round” since last they were in that room
together.

She tried to make amends by asking quickly, “Would you like some tea,
Greg, while we talk?”

“Thanks. If it’s no trouble.”

“We’re talking like strangers,” she thought wretchedly. But aloud she said
calmly that it was no trouble at all, that the things were already on the
trolley and the kettle would be boiling in a few minutes. Then she escaped
into the kitchen, where she stood watching the kettle and fighting back her
tears.

She was not really what her daughters called “the weepy kind”, and she
knew it was prolonged anxiety and lack of sleep which had made her so
weak. But she despised herself just the same and could not quite avoid the
idea that it was Greg’s coming which had affected her so deeply, and that
therefore she must show herself specially independent and mistress of
herself.

As she wheeled in the tea trolley he turned from the window and came
across to help her.

“It’s all right. There’s nothing to do,” she said quickly.

“Then tell me about this young man—and Pat,” he replied rather shortly,
as though quite prepared for the fact that he had come back home for one
thing, and one thing only.

As she poured out the tea, with a not entirely steady hand, she explained
about her visit to Jerry Penrose’s office that morning.

“Then you mean—” he frowned as he stirred his tea—“that she’s staying

away for some purpose of her own? There’s no compulsion about it? No
question of a real disappearance? Just some crazy plan of her own that you
haven’t yet fathomed?”
 “I don’t know. I only know that she should have come home and that she
hasn’t done so.”

“But it’s not quite the terrifying business we thought at first. I thought,
when you telephoned—”

“If you think I’ve got you here on false pretences—” her voice was
suddenly much higher than she had meant it to be—“you only have to say
so and go away again.”

“I’m not suggesting anything of the sort,” he said coldly. “And don’t get
so excited about things, Clare.”

“Excited?—excited? Have you any idea what the last twenty-two hours
have been like? Why, I hardly—” She stopped, looked dazed by her own
outburst and then said wearily, “I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“I don’t expect you did. I’m sorry,” he said in his turn. “It’s been tough
for you on your own, except for Marilyn. Where is she, by the way?”

“She went to visit a sick friend in hospital. She should be here any minute
now.”

“Is she very much upset about all this?”

 “She’s tried very hard to keep up her own spirits and mine.” Clare gave a
pale little smile. “She keeps on saying, without any foundation, that it will
be all right in the end. But she’s just as mystified as I am.”

“It seems impossible!” He got up and began to walk up and down the
room. “Is there not a single hint that either of you can recall which might
explain Pat’s action?”

“Nothing, Greg! There’s no—no undesirable attachment so far as I know.

She’s always brought her friends home here without question. She seemed
perfectly satisfied with her life here. People don’t just walk out of their
home like that for—”

She stopped, and they both looked at each other for a moment in
profound and ridiculous embarrassment. Then she muttered, “Unless
there’s a good reason, I mean.”

In the short silence which followed that she realised that perhaps it would
have been better not to add even those few explanatory words. And then,
with a relief that almost hurt, she heard the sound of a key in the door, and a
moment later Marilyn came into the room.

“Why,” she exclaimed, “it was all so quiet I thought Dad hadn’t arrived!”
She went over and kissed her father, who held her at arms’ length after
embracing her and smiled at her with delighted approval.
 “Mari, how you’ve grown up! You and Pat are almost young women.”

“Not quite.” Marilyn smiled back at him in her impish way, and Clare
noticed sadly that there was not a trace of the stiff self-consciousness
between them which had marred her own meeting with Greg.

Perhaps that was to be expected. But as the conversation immediately

exploded into the quick, casual give-and-take which exists only between
those who love and are very much at home with each other, she felt as
though a door closed—and she was the wrong side of it.
 CHAPTER III

IT was not in Clare to be jealous of her own child. So, although the easy
relationship between Marilyn and Greg gave her a feeling of sad isolation,
she was glad that at least someone seemed able to welcome him home with
uninhibited warmth. In addition, it did not escape her notice that her
daughter’s spirits seemed to have risen with a bound.

“No more news about Pat, I suppose?”

Marilyn sounded almost cheerfully resigned about that, and it was her
father who replied,

“No. We’re still desperately worried about her. But, just as you came in,
your mother and I were trying to decide if she had ever given the slightest
hint of some side of her life that might be secret from us—or you. Think,
Marilyn! Sisters often tell each other things they don’t necessarily tell their
parents. You and she were very close, weren’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” Marilyn went over to the trolley and helped herself to a
sandwich. At the same time she accepted a cup of tea from her mother with
a companionable sort of smile which warmed Clare’s heart. “But I hadn’t
seen her for three weeks, remember. You’re the one who last saw her, Dad.
What did she say to you that might have a bearing on things?”

“To me?” Greg looked somehow startled. Mostly, Clare thought, because
of Marilyn’s casual way of immediately re-involving him in the family
web. “Why should she talk to me about her innermost thoughts and
feelings?”

“Well, you’re her father,” Marilyn pointed out in a matter-of-fact tone of

voice. “Girls do confide in their fathers. And there were just the two of you
on your own. I thought you might have had some heart-to-heart talks
together.”

“No.” Greg, who had sat down again, shifted slightly in his chair. “We
didn’t do that.”

“Pity,” replied Marilyn with slightly impertinent good-humour. “You

wasted an opportunity.”

Then, before anyone could add anything to that, the telephone rang and
Marilyn, who was beside it, picked up the receiver.

Clare watched anxiously, with hope in her eyes. But this died away to the
familiar disappointment as she heard her daughter say, “Yes, he’s here. Just
a moment.”
 Then, to her utter amazement, Marilyn turned to her father and, still in
that rather cheeky tone, remarked,

“A call for you from Munich. It’s a woman’s voice. Let’s hope it’s not
Mrs. Curtiss following you up here.”

If there was surprise in Clare’s face, it was nothing to the dark flush of
angry astonishment which swept into her husband’s face, and he took the
receiver from Marilyn with something less than gentleness.

At the same time, Clare saw an extraordinary expression come over

Marilyn’s face—as though she had over-reached herself in some way and
was wondering how on earth to get back again.”

Mostly to avoid overhearing the telephone conversation, Clare said

quietly to her daughter, “Who is Mrs. Curtiss? I don’t seem to remember
—”

“It’s all right. A slip of the tongue,” Marilyn assured her airily. “It’s nice
to have Dad home, isn’t it?”

Clare said, “Yes,” because it was impossible to say, “No,” and in any
case, she was glad to have him home, however briefly, even though so far
his coming seemed to have brought as much pain as pleasure.
 Greg was still speaking on the telephone as she wheeled out the tea-
trolley into the kitchen, but when she came back a few minutes later he was
putting down the receiver.

“That was from my place in Munich. I asked the landlady to phone me if

any letter came for me from England. There was one an hour ago, but I’ve
established that it had nothing to do with Pat. And now, young lady—” he
turned grimly on his younger daughter—“exactly what did you mean by
that remark as you handed me the phone?”

“Oh—” Marilyn was still trying to be airily nonchalant, Clare saw—“it

was just a bit of daughterly cheek.”

“With an impertinent sting in it, if I’m not mistaken. I’d like to know
what you were hinting about Mrs. Curtiss.”

“Who,” asked Clare mildly, “is Mrs. Curtiss?” With a very nice sense of
timing, Marilyn left her

father to answer that one. Then, just as he drew breath to do so, she said,

“No one at all important, Mother. Just one of those pretty, rather boringly
designing widows who run after attractive men like Dad. Pat was rather
amusing about her.”

“When?” demanded her parents in unison.

 “In the last letter she wrote from Munich.”

“I never saw any letter she wrote from Munich!” exclaimed Clare. “I
thought she wrote only postcards.”

“She wrote one letter to me, about a week ago. I didn’t show it to you. It
was just a gossipy sort of letter between her and me. I don’t always show
you my letters.” Marilyn looked suddenly on the defensive.

“No, of course not. I wouldn’t expect you to,” Clare said quickly. “But in
the circumstances, any letter from Pat might contain an important clue.
Don’t you think we—you should look at it again?”

“I threw it away.”

“Oh, Mari!”

“It had nothing of any importance in it, I assure you.”

“Except some vulgar gossip about me, I gather.” Greg had recovered
from a good deal of momentary embarrassment, Clare saw, and was now
looking as grim as she had ever seen him.

“Not at all. Don’t make such heavy weather of it, Dad!” Clare almost
envied her child for her casual way of handling Greg. “As a matter of fact,
Pat rather admired your evasive actions. With such attractive parents, she
and I have grown used to watching people make passes at you both. We’re
intrigued by the fact that you’re hardly ever taken in.”

“Har—?” began her father. Then he said stiffly, “What an extraordinary

way of regarding your parents, surely?”

“Oh, not really,” Marilyn assured him. “Modern daughters see a lot more
than parents realise.”

“Well, if you’ve seen anyone making passes at me, you’ve certainly seen
more than I have,” Clare remarked, and she laughed for the first time since
Greg had come into the flat. “You’re an absurd child!”

“But you love me just the same, Mum, don’t you?” Marilyn hugged her
suddenly.

“Very much indeed.” As Clare returned the hug she looked past Marilyn’s
dark head and saw, with some astonishment, that this time it was Greg who
felt shut out. And, because she was essentially generous, she added
immediately, “And so does your father.”

“Yes, of course.” Marilyn flashed him an affectionate glance. “That’s

what is meant by family solidarity.”

It was not, of course, and the moment or two of silence which followed
this remark testified to the sad lack of solidarity now existing in this
particular family. Then Greg cleared his throat and said, with an air of
returning to essentials,

“So there was nothing—in this letter or anything else—to suggest any
side of Pat’s life which you didn’t know about?”

“Nothing at all.” Marilyn shook her head. “But my guess still is that
there’ll be a letter in the morning.”

“Why in the morning?” her mother asked with a sigh. “Why not a phone
call tonight, or a message of some sort at any other time? You keep on
speaking of hearing in the morning, as though—almost as though you had
some reason for thinking it.”

“Oh, Mother!” Marilyn sounded reproachful. “It’s just that tomorrow is

the first moment you could hear by letter, isn’t it? I mean, even if she wrote
last night as soon as she reached—wherever she was going, you wouldn’t
have got the letter today. Tomorrow is the first moment news could reach
you by post.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You seem to have worked it out in quite exact detail.” Her father looked
hard at her, but Marilyn withstood his glance admirably.
 “I just use my intelligence,” she explained. “That’s why I think it would
be a mistake to do anything like going to the police until after the post
comes tomorrow.—I’ll wash up, shall I? and you two can have a talk.”

And on this she went out into the kitchen, leaving a pregnant silence
behind her. Then finally, Clare said, “You don’t think she knows something
she doesn’t want to tell us, do you?”

“No. No, of course not. You mustn’t be so suspicious, Clare. You’re

always inclined to be.”

“I wasn’t suspicious about Mrs. Curtiss,” retorted Clare, and suddenly she
smiled mischievously in a way that gave her a fleeting likeness to her
younger daughter.

He looked startled for a moment. Then he laughed too.

“And I wasn’t suspicious about those men she says make passes at you,”
he returned almost gaily.

“It’s the most ridiculous thing! I don’t know what she was talking about,”
Clare declared.

“Kid’s do get funny ideas,” he agreed tolerantly. And suddenly she

realised that at last they were talking like people with intimate ties, and not
like strangers.
 Perhaps he felt it too, for after a moment he said, with a reflective smile,

“I didn’t know they rated us as attractive, did you?”

“Not really—no. I did know they thought the world of you. And I know
they’re extremely fond of me, as part of a background they value. But as
attractive individuals—”

“With a good technique for fending off admirers,” he finished, and they
both laughed then.

“As a matter of fact, of course, you are tremendously attractive still,

Clare,” he said suddenly. “You don’t look a day older and—”

“Oh, I look a hag!” she exclaimed. “Just before you came I caught a
glimpse of myself in the mirror and I thought how drab and middle-aged
and dreary I looked and—”

“You didn’t look at all like that to me when I came in.”

“No?” She smiled and felt indescribably cheered. “Well, I’d had time to
put on a touch of make-up by then.”

“For me?” he enquired unexpectedly, a little as though the thought

touched him.
 “For my own morale too, I expect,” she returned frankly. “I didn’t want
to look my very worst for a—a difficult meeting.”

“It was difficult, wasn’t it?” he agreed with a slight grimace. “And yet,
now it’s been forced upon us, I’m glad to have made some sort of contact
again.”

“So am I,” she said, and swallowed.

“It’s rather ridiculous, really, for two people to keep hundreds of miles
between them just because they feel they can’t actually live together any
more.”

“Yes,” said Clare, as though she too had had something to do with putting
such a distance between them.

“I mean—in a civilised society people get divorced and still go on being

friendly even after they marry someone else.”

Clare wanted to say that this had never struck her as one of the most
engaging or most sensible aspects of civilised society. But she refrained.
Instead, she murmured, “Yes, of course.”

“In fact—though perhaps it isn’t quite the time to talk about it—if you
ever wanted to divorce me for—”
 “I don’t,” said Clare, wondering what had happened to the warm and
intimate note they had struck such a few minutes ago. “I mean—do you
have to talk about such a thing at this moment?”

“No—no.” He looked put out. “The idea just occurred to me.”

Silence fell upon them again and lasted until Marilyn came back from the
kitchen. She seemed not to notice it, however. At any rate, she quite coolly
asked her father the question which Clare simply could not bring herself to
ask.

“Are you staying here while you’re in London?”

“Certainly not!” He seemed to have no doubt about that. “I’m staying at

the Gloria.”

“You could have Pat’s room until she comes back, you know,” Marilyn
explained.

“Thank you. But I hope Pat will very soon be occupying her own room
herself.”

“Of course. But until she does—

“Mari—” In the interests of both of them, Clare came coolly to the

rescue. “It may sound silly, but there’s a technical point involved. If your
father or I ever wanted a divorce it would be best for him not to have been
staying here.”

“Oh, I see. I hadn’t thought of anyone wanting to get a divorce,” said

Marilyn flatly.

“Nor had I!” thought Clare. But, like Greg, she said nothing.

He stayed quite a while longer, discussing every other thin possibility of a

line on Pat’s movements. But they always came back to the same point—
that what evidence there was suggested some sort of intention on her part
and, that being so, it seemed wiser to wait at least to see what the morning’s
post might bring before doing anything “drastic” as Clare put it.

“And by drastic you mean going to the police,” Greg said.

“Or to an enquiry agent.”

“No. The police have much wider powers for investigation. In fact, I’d
feel a good deal happier if we had them on the job already. We’ve had
enough delay, it seems to me.”

“It’s only twenty-four hours, though it feels like days,” Clare reminded
him. “I’m inclined to think Marilyn is right and that we should give it until
morning. Pat wouldn’t thank us for stirring up a lot of unnecessary
publicity.”
 “I wasn’t thinking of what Pat would thank us for,” her husband retorted
grimly. “After such monkeying with all our nerves, she must take the
consequences.”

“If she really has gone of her own accord,” said Marilyn softly. And as
the shadow of a terrible alternative fell across them again she saw her
father’s anger retreat.

“If she hasn’t we ought to be at the nearest police station now,” he

declared shortly. But in the end he agreed to wait until the first post in the
morning. “Though not ten minutes longer,” he added.

“I’ll phone you as soon as the post has come,” Clare promised. And then
he went away.

“I thought he might have stayed to dinner,” observed Marilyn in a slightly

dispirited voice.

Clare had rather thought it too. She had even made the sweet he specially
liked, in hopeful anticipation. But aloud she said,

“It’s not easy for him, Mari.”

“It’s not easy for any of us,” retorted Marilyn Then, as she remembered
almost exactly the same exchange of words between herself and her sister,
her double responsibility seemed to weigh heavily upon her.
 Her instinctive sigh was not lost on her mother, who put it down to a
touching need of parental support and was extra tender to her in
consequence. This only made Marilyn feel guilty, however, and she was
nervously glad when the telephone rang again.

On the principle that she must check everything she could, Marilyn seized
the phone a moment before her mother could. But a pleasant masculine
voice asked firmly for Mrs. Collamore, and she relinquished it reluctantly.

“Yes?” Clare’s tone was both anxious and hopeful. “This is Mrs.
Collamore.”

“And this is Jerry Penrose,” was the reply. “Don’t raise your hopes too
high, but I think I have a line on Pat.”

“Oh, Jerry!—Mr. Penrose, I mean—”

“Jerry will do. I looked up timetables after you had gone, and it struck me
that unless she was very well informed about the train and bus situation, the
most natural thing for her to do was to hire a car. So when I left the office I
went down to Harwich—”

“You went down to Harwich?—personally? But how terribly kind of you

to take so much trouble!”
 “Not at all. You’re the kind of person one likes to help, if I may say so,
Mrs. Collamore. And anyway, I wanted to back my hunch.”

“Well, go on—” Clare’s eyes were sparkling with hope, and she said in a
quick aside to Marilyn, “It’s that nice Jerry Penrose. He thinks he has a line
on Pat.”

“O—oh—” Marilyn swallowed nervously, and looked less than grateful

for the intervention of the nice Jerry Penrose.

“At first I drew a blank. But then I found a car-hire firm where the office
clerk was quite bright. He says one of their men drove a pretty blonde girl
in a white coat to West cliff last night and—”

“Whereabouts in Westcliff?” cried Clare, too absorbed to notice that her

younger daughter jumped like a shot rabbit.

“That’s just it. They can’t let us know until tomorrow. The driver had his
day off today, and although the clerk tried to get him on the phone, his wife
said he wouldn’t be back until very late. But when he does come he should
be able to say exactly where he took her.”

“Oh, my dear boy—” Clare’s voice quivered with grateful emotion

—“you don’t know how grateful I am! It was a wonderful idea of yours.
And so very, very kind of you to follow it up like that. My husband and I
will go down first thing in the morning.—Where did you say?—Yes—yes, I
have a pencil. Yes, I’m writing it down now. I do thank you so much. And
I’ll let you know what happens. Bless you! I’ll sleep much better tonight
for this.

“Just imagine—” she replaced the receiver and turned to Marilyn eagerly
—“he went down to Harwich, backed his hunch that she probably hired a
car, and found the place where she did get a car—”

“He made himself pretty busy on her affairs considering he’s a complete
stranger, didn’t he?” exclaimed Marilyn ungraciously.

“Mari! He’s given me my first moments of relief since she disappeared.

How can you talk so? Except for the fact that the driver had his day off
today, we could have had the address right away. As it is we must wait until
the morning.—Oh, darling, why are you mopping your forehead in that
queer way? Is it the reaction? I’m sorry I spoke sharply. I know—I feel
pretty limp myself. The relief is almost as painful as the anxiety. But how
kind of that boy—!”

“It wasn’t just kindness. He’s dead keen on Pat. She said—” Marilyn
caught her breath in a great gasp—“she said often enough that—that some
goofy fellows just fall for her on sight.”

“Well, this isn’t a goofy fellow,” replied Clare crisply. “He’s kind and
intelligent and bothers about other people, which is more than many do
nowadays. If he really leads us to Pat I’ll think him the nearest thing to a
knight in shining armour that I’m ever likely to know. I must telephone
Greg.”

“He probably won’t be in,” said Marilyn discouragingly.

“Why shouldn’t he be?” Clare looked surprised. “Well, you don’t suppose
he went from here just to sit in a hotel bedroom all the evening, do you?”
replied Marilyn rudely. “I expect he’s out at a theatre enjoying himself.”

“Marilyn, if I didn’t know it was anxiety that was making you so rude
and ungracious I’d be really angry! You mustn’t talk of your father like
that. He’s just as worried about Pat as I am.”

“Then he could have stayed here and kept us company,” retorted Marilyn,
and she looked rather as though she were going to cry.

“Dear—” Clare sought desperately for the right words to explain the
wrong actions—“it isn’t so simple as that. You see—”

“It’s perfectly simple!” cried Marilyn, all her worry and weariness and
fright suddenly boiling up into furious anger. “The simple fact is that he
doesn’t want to bother about any of us. He wants a nice, charming
irresponsible life where everyone makes a fuss of him and flatters him and
makes him feel good. That’s why he walked out on us all!”
 She stopped as abruptly as she had started and a complete, shocked
silence filled the room like something tangible.

“I’m sorry,” Marilyn muttered at last. “I shouldn’t have said that, but—”

“I’m glad you did,” Clare said slowly. “Because it’s almost exactly what I
said—often. Oh, much, much too often! It seemed to me then the exact and
bitter truth. It gave me a sort of dreadful importance to be always the
injured party. Only, if you cast yourself for the role of injured party, the sole
way to preserve your significance and identity is to cherish the injuries. It’s
the most utterly soul-destroying thing in any relationship, justified or
unjustified. I know that now.”

Marilyn stared fascinatedly at her mother.

“But he—he was in the wrong, wasn’t he?” she said at last.

“Yes. And so was I.” Clare drew a long sigh. “It’s never all on one side,
Mari. I suppose I knew that, in a way. I wasn’t so stupid as not to know at
least that. But what you know and what governs your behaviour when
you’re bitter and angry are two quite different things. I can’t tell you how
strange it was to hear you using almost my own words. They sounded
logical and justified in my own mouth. But when someone else says them
they have a hollow ring.
 “I thought they sounded pretty good when I said them!” Marilyn grinned
faintly at her mother.

“There’s a bit of truth in them, darling. Don’t think I’m pretending

anything else.” Clare smiled at her child. “But a bit of truth can sometimes
be worse than a completely wrong statement. It’s not easy to see and accept
one’s own mistakes. Still less is it easy to explain them to someone else—
even one’s very dear daughter. Will you just take it from me that it wasn’t a
simple issue, and that neither of us was blameless?”

“All right.” Marilyn gave her mother a not very well aimed kiss which
landed on the bridge of her nose. “Now you phone Dad and if he is in—I’ll
apologise.”

Clare gave a vexed little laugh. And she would have been more than
human if she had not felt a certain sense of triumph and relief when Greg’s
voice answered her as soon as the connection had been made.

“Greg, it’s Clare!” The fact that she made a small face at her younger
daughter across the room might have accounted for the fact that her voice
sounded light and almost gay. “I think we have news of Pat at last.” And
rapidly she explained the success of Jerry Penrose’s investigations.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I have the phone number of the garage, and I’ll
phone in the morning. And then, when I have Pat’s address, we could—I
mean I will, if you like—”
 “We’re both going down there,” he told her firmly. “We’ll take the car. It
will be the easiest way of bringing back the child and her luggage. Heaven
knows what sort of problem we shall find when we get there, but we’ll
worry about that when we have to. Thank God! It does sound like the real
answer, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Wait a moment, Greg! Mari is making signs.” Clare took the
receiver away from her ear and said, “What is it, dear?”

“The apology.” Marilyn held out her hand.

“I thought you were making that to me!” Her mother looked amused.

“No. To Dad.” Marilyn took the receiver and said, “Hello, Dad. I owe you
an apology. I told Mother it was no use ringing you because you’d be out
on the town, enjoying yourself.”

There was a short—perhaps stunned—silence at the other end. Then her

father’s voice said, “What made you think that, child?”

“I thought you didn’t really care very much about what happened to any
of us.” She ignored her mother’s gasp in the background. “Mother insisted I
was wrong. It seems she knew best. I’m sorry.” Then she quietly replaced
the receiver, said goodnight to her mother and went to her room.
 It was Marilyn who slept badly that night, then heavily towards morning,
and who was roused from heavy veils of sleep by her mother’s voice
calling, “There’s a letter! Mari, there’s a letter in Pat’s writing. Can I come
in?”

“Yes, of course!” Marilyn struggled into a sitting position and rubbed her
eyes. “Read it, Mother! What does she say?”

“It’s very short.” With unsteady hands Clare had ripped open the envelope
and drawn out the single sheet. “She says—‘Dear Mother, This is just to tell
you that I am perfectly safe and well. There is no need for you to worry
about me. But I am staying away from home for the time being.—Love,
Pat.’ ”

“Is that all she says?” exclaimed Marilyn, divided between admiration
and irritation at her sister’s masterly brevity.

“That’s—all.” Clare turned the sheet over and over in her hands, as
though she must surely find a fresh clue or piece of information
somewhere. “But it explains nothing—nothing! The child must be ill. It’s
some sort of breakdown. She couldn’t write like that otherwise. Not a word
of real explanation—not a hint. Just that she’s staying away from home for
the time being. She can’t even have very much money left by now!”

There were tears of disappointment and bewilderment in Clare’s eyes, and

Marilyn with difficulty prevented herself from saying that she had at least
replenished Pat’s funds with ten pounds. Instead, she said mechanically,

“Don’t cry, Mother. At least we know she is safe.”

“I’m not crying. And thanks to Jerry Penrose, she should be back with us
in a matter of hours. But she must be ill, my poor little Pat. What other
explanation is there? I’m going to phone that garage now and find if they
have got her address.”

“I’d leave it until after breakfast if I were you,” said Marilyn, with a
surreptitious, anxious glance at the clock. “If that driver hasn’t reported for
duty yet they won’t have the information, and you’ll only get more and
more jumpy and frustrated if you have to keep on calling. Give it a little
longer, Mother.”

“You’re probably right.” Clare smiled faintly and ruffled her daughter’s
hair. “You’re such a sensible child, Mari.”

Feeling very guilty, Marilyn muttered something about getting up, and her
mother went away.

Greg arrived almost as they sat down to breakfast, and in the end it was
he who telephoned to Harwich. The relieved expression which spread over
his face almost immediately told Clare and Marilyn that he had the precious
information, even before he rang off and exclaimed,
 “All right! I’ve got it. It’s a small private hotel. He couldn’t remember the
number, but has given me the street. And he remembered the unusual
bracelet she was wearing, because it caught in her handbag strap as she was
paying the fare.”

He thankfully accepted the cup of coffee Clare put in front of him, and
then examined afresh the letter which she had shown him as soon as he
arrived.

“It’s desperately uninformative, isn’t it?” he frowned. “Not a hint of plans

or reasons—or even difficulties.”

“Mother thinks she must be ill,” contributed Marilyn.

“And you, Mari? What do you think?” Her father’s glance was
unexpectedly gentle. “Do you suppose that, like you, she might think I—we
—people didn’t care about what happened to her?”

“I don’t know.” Marilyn stared with some attention into her coffee cup.
“When people keep away from each other it’s easy to get wrong
impressions, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer that, and after a while Clare said, as
gently as she might have to one of her children, “Drink your coffee, Greg.
We’ll start as soon as you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now.” He got up quickly.

 “Mari, here’s my shopping list.” Her mother handed over a slip of paper
and some notes. “I don’t know what time we’ll get back, so would you see
after that for me, dear?”

“Yes, of course.” With difficulty Marilyn concealed her own impatience

to be off, for she could hardly wait to join Pat at her new address and warn
her that the chase was much hotter than they had ever expected. That,
indeed, it might be wiser for her to move yet again, so that she should be
more than one jump ahead.

Cleverly, she managed to delay her parents for a quarter of an hour longer,
which made her fairly certain that Pat would have got well away before
they could drive the miles to Westcliff. For her own plans, it was perhaps
just as well to do the shopping first. This, she argued, would give her sister
time to arrive at the new address, where they would immediately review
their plans and make any necessary fresh decisions.

On her own at last, she whisked round the flat, cleared up the breakfast
things, and hurried off to do the shopping. Like most shopping, it took a
good deal longer than she had expected. But she got everything, took it
back to the flat, distributed it in the proper places, so that there should be no
impression that she had done anything in a wild hurry, and then at last she
was free.

“Pat’s bound to be there by now,” she assured herself, as she took the
Underground to Notting Hill Gate. “By the time I’ve walked to the hotel—”
 Like the shopping, the walk took longer than she had expected, and after a
while the thought struck her that she was not really going in the right
direction.

“Idiot! Why didn’t I look up the exact address before I started?” she asked
herself angrily. “If I come to a post office, I’ll have a glance at a directory.”

But before she found a post office she suddenly saw the garage which she
and Pat had both remembered. Even from a distance she recognised the
individual drive-in, flanked by large stone plant-pots, and she hurried on
past the curve in the road which hid the other pavement from her view.

And then she stopped dead, with the most dreadful jerk of dismay. For
there was no Chipperfield Hotel—or any other kind of hotel—opposite the
garage. There was just a block of very new-looking offices.

For a panic-stricken moment or two, she tried to tell herself she had
mistaken the garage. And then, certain though she was that this at least she
had recognised, she went up to the man who was standing by the line of
pumps.

“I was looking for the Chipperfield Hotel,” she said, in a voice she could
not keep entirely steady. “It—I thought it was opposite, on that corner.”

“So it was, my dear, until something like a year ago,” the man assured
her.
 “Did the—the people who ran it move elsewhere?” asked Marilyn
desperately.

“No. The old lady died. It was a family affair, I believe. And the place
was sold up. Pretty penny they got for it too, I reckon,” the man added
reflectively. “It’s a good site. Funny you should come and ask me about it.
You’re the second young lady this morning to come enquiring for the
Chipperfield.”

“Oh, that would be my sister,” cried Marilyn, thankful for even this frail
link with Pat. “When was that? Where did she go?”

“We-ell, I’d say it was best part of an hour ago. And as for where she
went I couldn’t tell you. She just got back into her taxi—for she’d some
luggage with her—and drove away.”
 CHAPTER IV

FOR several panic-stricken minutes after she left the garage, Marilyn
walked about in an aimless sort of way. She tried to persuade herself that
somehow, for some unknown reason, Pat might have lingered in the
district. But soon the absurdity of such an idea forced itself upon her. Why
should Pat do that? To the best of her belief Marilyn would not be visiting
the hotel until Wednesday. She had no reason whatever to think that the
urgency of events would bring her young sister there sooner.

“Then what would be the most likely thing for her to do when she found
the hotel no longer existed?” Marilyn asked herself distractedly. “What
would I do in the circumstances?”

Surely the most obvious and urgent thing would be to re-establish contact
with her one ally in order to discuss—or even report—changed plans.

“Would she dare to phone home?” thought Marilyn. “Risky—but what

else could she do? She would have to risk Mother’s answering instead of
me, of course. But then she could always just hang up quietly if Mother did
reply. She may even have tried that already! In fact, I ought to be at home
now, so as to get any message before the parents return.” And, galvanised
into action by the sheer relief of having something specific to do, Marilyn
made for the nearest Underground station as fast as she could. Once in the
train, she fumed and counted and recounted the stations on the map
opposite her and wondered if a taxi would have been quicker. But she had
been rather lavish with taxis recently and the expense of this undertaking
were already proving distinctly more than she and Pat had anticipated.

Fortunately, it was only five minutes’ walk from her local station to the
flat, and Marilyn did it in just under three. She was panting when she
emerged from the lift, and she gave an extra gasp when she realised that a
completely strange young man was standing outside her front door.

“Good morning,” he said, before she could address him. “Are you by any
chance Marilyn Collamore?”

“Yes.” Marilyn regarded him suspiciously. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Jerry Penrose and—”

“Oh, I know about you!” She immediately became wary. “You met my
mother, didn’t you? And you did some self-appointed sleuthing about my
sister.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he replied stiffly. “But if you would

prefer me to take no further interest, just say so and I’ll go away without
giving you your sister’s message.”
 “Message? You’ve got a message from Pat?” Marilyn’s whole attitude
changed. “Oh, no—please don’t be offended. I’m sorry if I was curt, but
we’re all a bit on edge, you know. Come in, anyway—” She began to
fumble for her key, but the young man stopped her.

“Don’t you know you should never invite strange men in when you’re on
your own?” he said severely. “I might be any sort of crook, for all you
know.”

“Oh, rubbish,” retorted Marilyn lightly. “You’ve been reading too many
thrillers.”

“I begin to think I’m living one, from the ridiculous and mysterious way
you and your sister are going on,” he replied crossly. “But anyway, I don’t
want to come in. I promised Pat I would see you alone, and she seemed
certain her parents would be out this morning—following some
preposterous false clue, if I’m not mistaken.” He looked severely at
Marilyn, who withstood the glance with admirable coolness.

“Can we go somewhere and talk?” he asked, with a return to his rather

stiff manner. “In case they came in, I mean.”

“Can’t you just give me her message and leave it at that?”

“No, I can’t.” Suddenly he looked extraordinarily obstinate. “I’m not

prepared to go on following instructions meekly and blindly. I agreed to
deliver your sister’s message, since she made such a point of it. But I intend
to ask some questions of my own in return.”

Marilyn eyed him without favour at that. But she could not afford to
make terms of her own at the moment. She needed too badly to know Pat’s
message. So a little ungraciously she said,

“Come on, then. We’ll go and have some coffee at a place round the
corner. Even if Mother and Dad come home, they won’t look for me there.”

In silence they retraced their steps to the lift, descended to the ground
floor and walked the short distance to the coffee-shop. It was as though
neither was prepared to accept the disadvantage of speaking first. And only
when they were seated at the back of the dim coffee lounge did Marilyn say
briskly, “Well, now tell me Pat’s message. And first of all, how did she get
it to you?”

“She telephoned me at my office. I think I must have mentioned the firm I

work for when she and I talked together on the cross-Channel boat. She
told me her father was an artist, and I explained that I too was an artist of
sorts. Commercial art with Morgan and Petersfield. She evidently
remembered the name.” He seemed pleased that at least Pat had
remembered this much about him. But Marilyn urged him on to the real
point.

“Go on. When did she telephone?”

 “Hardly more than an hour ago, I’d say. She was evidently a good deal
distressed and she said—” his manner softened perceptibly—“that I was the
only person to whom she could turn.”

Marilyn, who knew how wonderfully well Pat could conduct this sort of
conversation, nodded understandingly.

“She said she was going to be unable to keep an appointment with you.”
He stopped and stared hard at the girl opposite. “Is that correct? Was there
an appointment between you two?”

“If she said so, it isn’t for me to deny it,” replied Marilyn, who thought
that was pretty diplomatic. “I’m asking you a question,” he said angrily.

“And I’m not answering anything until I hear the whole message,”
retorted Marilyn.

They glared at each other in a hostile manner, as though each were trying
to decide who held the better cards. Then he seemed to remember that his
principle business was to deliver the message, for he went on rather sulkily,

“She said—and she made me repeat the words, to make sure I got them
right—that I was to tell you she would leave a message with the garage
man; that you would understand what this meant when you got there.”
 “Clever old Pat!” exclaimed Marilyn in immense relief, before she could
stop herself. For of course, Pat would not expect her to make the discovery
about the non-existence of the agreed hotel until she arrived to keep her
Wednesday appointment. No doubt she had made a fruitless attempt to
telephone, banking on the fact that inevitably her parents would have gone
to Westcliff after receiving her letter. And, finding her sister also not at
home, she had had to involve this tiresome young man, rather than risk
Marilyn losing her head when she found their frail line of communication
had snapped.

“I might say that clever old Pat sounded very much the damsel in
distress,” observed Jerry Penrose at that moment, and it was obvious that,
like most people who discover that their good nature has been imposed
upon, he had arrived at the stage of feeling a bit of a fool and very angry
about it.

“Oh, yes, she would,” agreed Marilyn absently, “she would.”

“She was so upset,” he went on grimly, “that against my better judgment,

I promised to deliver her absurd message. But by now I’ve come to the
conclusion that you girls are involved in some disgraceful kind of prank
and behaving abominably to your exceptionally nice mother.”

“Mind your own business,” retorted Marilyn coldly. “We’re grateful for
your help over this—this temporary crisis. But I assure you the whole thing
is purely a private family matter, and I’d take it as a gentlemanly act on
your part if you would now forget that you ever received this message.”

“Stop talking like someone in a badly written book,” he countered

disgustedly. “Gentlemanly act, indeed! And I’m not forgetting anything just
to please you. What sort of a fool do you think I am? I’ve obliged your
sister by delivering her message. I’ve even—most reluctantly—observed
her almost hysterical request to make sure that I saw you alone, without
your parents knowing. But farther than that I’m not prepared to go. Now I
am going to ask the questions, and you’re going to give the answers.”

“And suppose I won’t answer?”

“Then I go straight back to the flat and wait until your parents—or at least
your mother—comes in. And I put all my cards on the table and tell her that
not only have I heard from Pat, but that I’ve been asked to convey a
message to you which shows that the pair of you are in some sort of
ridiculous collusion over this disappearance.”

“You wouldn’t be such a sneak, after promising Pat to deliver the

message without letting the parents know! You wouldn’t go back on your
word, surely?”

“I didn’t give my word. I’m not such a mutt as that; and I’m too sorry
about your mother’s distress in all this for me to agree to tie my hands
without knowing the true circumstances. I promised to deliver Pat’s
message to you alone, and I said that, provided you could satisfy me that
there was no necessity for me to concern myself further in the business, I
would take no further action. But I reserved the right to make that decision
only when I had heard what you had to say.”

“And what was her answer to that?” enquired Marilyn cautiously.

“She gave a couple more sobs—” in retrospect he now seemed to attach

less heart-rending importance to those sobs than he had when he first began
his story—“but then she finally said she would have to agree to my terms,
and she would leave it to you to decide how much to say.”

“She put it that way?”

“Exactly that way.”

“Well then,” said Marilyn, with a sigh that was not entirely regretful,
“perhaps I’d better tell you the truth.”

“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said so far! Will you have another
coffee?”

“Yes, please. And a Danish pastry. They have good ones here, and
emotion always makes me hungry.” He ordered more coffee and some
Danish pastries and watched Marilyn closely as she obviously groped for
the right words.
 “Just the simple truth,” he told her drily. “You needn’t add any
misleading details.”

“The truth is seldom simple,” Marilyn replied a little sententiously, “and

in order to explain what happened today I have to tell you other things too.
Private, very personal things, since you insist.”

She paused and looked at him accusingly, but he remained unmoved.

And after a moment she went on, “It starts with the fact that my parents
separated about a year ago. They’re wonderful people, both of them, and
Pat and I adore them. For the purposes of this story it doesn’t matter which
was right and which was wrong. Anyway, Mother says they were both
wrong,” she added, in a sudden burst of confidence.

“I could imagine she would,” he said. “She struck me as an exceptionally

civilised and fair-minded person.”

“Did she?” Marilyn immediately looked more friendly, and continued her
story more willingly. “In a way it was their business, of course, rather than
ours, particularly as we were almost grown-up!” To the young man
opposite she looked singularly young and rather pathetic as she made this
broad-minded assertion, and his glance softened insensibly as she sighed
and went on, “But it was our life too, and I just can’t tell you how our
world fell apart when it happened. They didn’t mean it to. They thought it
was enough to say they both loved us still and that we would always belong
to both of them. I think they even imagined it wouldn’t hit us so hard as we
were away at boarding school. But you can lie awake and cry just as well in
a dormitory as at home. The only difference is that you have to shove your
head under the bedclothes if you sniff loudly.”

“You poor kids!” exclaimed Jerry Penrose. “It’s hard to imagine such a
situation when one’s own home life has been all right.”

“Was yours all right?” Marilyn looked genuinely interested.

“Oh, goodness, yes! My parents weren’t especially demonstrative, but I

suppose they pretty well thought the light shone out of each other. My
father died before he was fifty, and my mother never really got over it,
though she’s very cheerful and good company. She says you just have to
find a new pattern of life and not be too self-pitying. I’m very fond of my
mother. That’s partly why I was so sorry for your mother when I saw her so
anxious and distressed.”

“I know, I know! It’s awful to have to make her so unhappy. But it really
is in the best of causes,” Marilyn insisted, in her favourite phrase. “You see,
Pat and I are convinced they’re still fond of each other, however bitterly
they may have quarrelled. Only Dad stupidly took himself off abroad, and
what can you do about reconciling them if they’re hundreds of miles apart?
Particularly as Dad’s quite dangerously attractive, even now, and the kind
that women run after. He truly doesn’t take much notice usually. I mean,
he’s not a philanderer or anything drippy like that. But men always fall for
subtle flattery if it comes from an attractive female.”
 “Really?”

“Yes, really! And you needn’t smile in that superior way. You were
purring like a cat yourself when you told me Pat said you were the only
person she could turn to.”

“I was the only person in the circumstances!” He reddened angrily.

“Yes, I daresay. But her cleverness was in making you feel that was a
distinction instead of a bore. But never mind. She likes you, anyway. She
told me so.—But let’s get back to the story,” added Marilyn quickly as she
saw that her companion would willingly follow that delightful red herring,
if allowed to. “Pat and I realised it was vital to get the parents together
again, else they’d never discover that they really wanted each other still. So
Pat went out to spend three weeks’ holiday with Dad, and we arranged that
she should disappear on the way home.”

“You arranged it? You mean you horrible children deliberately inflicted
this misery and anguish on your mother who loves you?”

“On Dad too,” agreed Marilyn, unmoved. “And not so much of the
‘children’. I bet you’re not all that much older than we are.”

“Of course lam!”

“How much older?”

 “It doesn’t matter,” Jerry Penrose said coldly. “What does matter is that
you and Pat did this dreadful thing to your parents, who—”

“But it worked, didn’t it?” interrupted Marilyn coolly.

“How do you mean it worked?”

“Well, Dad came home, didn’t he?” said Marilyn simply. “For the first
time in nearly a year he came rushing to Mother’s side, to console her and
share her anxiety. And there they are now hareing up and down the country
together looking for Pat. She’s wringing Dad’s heart with her pathetic
anxiety and he’s warming her heart with the feeling that she’s being looked
after again. I reckon there’s a seventy-five per cent chance that it will bring
them together again. So long as no interfering busybody thinks he knows
better and spoils things.”

“Meaning me?”

“We-ell—”

“But I never heard of such a thing! Situations involving real people don’t
just solve themselves like that.”

“How do you know they don’t? If you’ve never heard of such a thing—
and frankly, nor have I—how do either of us know it won’t work? It’s bold
and original, and it’s based on our belief that they do really love each
other.”

“But—” Jerry Penrose was obviously wavering, and yet distressed to find
that he was—“I promised your mother I’d keep in touch with her, do
everything in my power to help her to find Pat. I’d feel the most utter skunk
if I joined this disgraceful deception, even as a passive partner. As it is, I
feel awful at having sent her off to Westcliff on what is obviously now a
false scent.”

“If you hadn’t interfered you wouldn’t have raised her hopes unduly,”
Marilyn pointed out severely. But he looked so startled and unhappy over
this viewpoint that she relented and said, “As a matter of fact, she and Dad
would have gone off to Westcliff anyway this morning, because Pat wrote
from there and they got the letter by the first post.”

“She wrote?” He brightened up considerably at that.

“Very meagrely,” Marilyn explained. “Saying little more than that she
was perfectly all right. But it did take off the worst edge of their anxiety.”

“Thank heaven for that! But—mind, I don’t want to sound as though I’m
condoning this business—but if the anxiety is over, mightn’t your father go
back to Munich almost right away?”
 “No.” Marilyn shook her head. “Because, you see, the anxiety is not over.
They still don’t know where Pat is—or why she went away or when she’s
coming back. In fact, they still don’t have any idea of what has happened to
her.

“You really are diabolical, aren’t you?” he exclaimed angrily.

“No. Only desperate. And sometimes I’m very frightened too.” Marilyn
gazed sadly across the table at Jerry Penrose, in a way that made him
profoundly uncomfortable. She lacked Pat’s real beauty, and she had
nothing like such a talent for making people do what she wanted. But
Marilyn possessed one priceless gift. She could cry to order. And as she
looked mournfully at her companion she forced two big tears into her eyes
and made them spill down her cheeks.

“Oh, please don’t!” he cried in the utmost dismay.

“But you make me so miserable—and anxious. You talk about Mother’s

anxiety, and I know it’s awful for her, poor darling. But what about my
anxiety, when you sit there trying to decide if it’s your duty to ruin all our
hopes and plans, just because you think you know what is better for our
family than we do ourselves?”

“I don’t think that,” he protested. “How could I? I didn’t even know any
of you existed a week ago.”
 “Well, that’s what I mean,” said Marilyn reproachfully. “How can you
think it your business to interfere when you know so little about the people
concerned?”

“I’m just thinking of your mother—” he began unhappily.

“Do you suppose I’m not thinking of her too? Do you suppose Pat isn’t
thinking of her while she plays out this horribly difficult part? It’s because
we want her—and all of us—to be happy again that we’re doing this thing.”

“You don’t think—” he sounded more diffident now and nothing like so
sure of his course of action—“you don’t think you might be tragically
mistaken in the way you’re going about things?”

“We think it’s worth trying. We think a bit of unhappiness now may
prevent a great deal more unhappiness later. We may be wrong, but we feel
we have to make the attempt. All we ask is that no one spoils the whole
thing, just as it’s showing some signs of succeeding.”

“Oh, all right! You win,” exclaimed Jerry Penrose. “I’m not a bit happy
about it, and I feel I’m letting down your mother in some way, after she
appealed to me to help her. But the way you put it leaves me very little
choice. You make it sound as though even the best-meant interference
might do a lot more harm than good—”
 “That’s right,” interjected Marilyn joyfully. “Oh, I’m so glad you see it
that way at last! And if it’s any consolation to you, I tell you what I’ll do.
I’ll keep in touch with you and let you know when it all works out all right.
And then you can see Pat again and receive her thanks in person. You’d like
that, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “I’d like to see Pat again, of course. But I’m hanged
if I know how I’m going to explain my part in things to your mother.”

“You probably won’t have to,” Marilyn assured him soothingly, as they
rose and made their way to the cash desk, where he insisted on paying for
them both. “By the time you’re due for Pat’s personal thanks, I hope
Mother will be so radiantly happy that she won’t much mind what any of us
did to bring about a reconciliation between her and Dad.”

“Well, I hope you’re right,” he said sceptically.

“I know I am.” Marilyn actually shook him cordially by the hand as she
said good-bye, for her sense of relief at having at last silenced him was
immense. “If Mother is a bit anxious and miserable now, it’s nothing
compared to the joy she’ll feel later.” And with a confident wave of her
hand, Marilyn turned and walked rapidly homewards, while Jerry Penrose
made his way more slowly towards the Underground, increasingly certain
that he had somehow been stampeded into doing something he would
presently very much regret.
 Marilyn hummed contentedly as she re-entered the block of flats. There
was a very good morning’s work behind her. She had re-established contact
with Pat—or nearly so—she had silenced the tiresome scruples of Mr. Jerry
Penrose, and she had cheered herself insensibly by talking a great deal of
the happy times ahead when their scheme would have succeeded, and the
need for all this complicated deception no longer existed.

Her confidence, however, might have been slightly shaken if she could
have guessed at the depths of her mother’s despair at that moment.

The morning’s expedition had started well. It was almost like old times to
be sitting beside Greg in the car, with a long drive in front of them. And the
fact that she was certain she was going to find Pat at the end of it raised
Clare’s spirits to a pitch almost in keeping with the brightness of the day.

Greg drove. Partly because it was natural for him to take the lead when
they were together, and partly because she guessed he desperately wanted
to be doing something—anything—specific towards the finding of their
daughter.

For a while there was silence. Not a difficult silence, oddly enough, and
Clare took comfort from that too. Now that they had crossed the first bridge
across the rift that had been torn in their lives, they seemed able to accept
each other’s company with a naturalness she had never expected. She was
content to sit there enjoying the fact.
 It was he who spoke first, when they were free of the most congested part
of their route, and what he said was, “Did you hear what Marilyn said to me
over the phone last night?—about thinking I didn’t really care much what
happened to any of you.”

“Yes, I heard. I was still in the room.” She could tell from his tone that he
still felt shocked about it.

“Clare, did you know that was how she—perhaps they—felt?”

“I didn’t know until yesterday that she felt quite so strongly about it. She
started to talk in that vein just before we phoned. It shook me too, Greg. I
tried to reason with her—”

“That was generous of you,” he interjected curtly. “Not really. For

whatever she felt about your part in things applied—I’m not quite sure in
what degree—to me too. You weren’t the only one who had failed them.”

“You feel that was what we did?” He flashed her a quick glance.

“Well, of course. Whatever our reasons—good or bad—we cut the secure

ground of their home life from under their feet. Oh, I know it isn’t quite as
simple as that. But I suppose—” she sighed involuntarily—“at their age life
is simple. Or should be. It’s made up of a few things, but those few are
vital. Perhaps I should have let them talk more about it, get it out of their
system. But I felt that a lot of discussion wouldn’t be fair to you—to the
one who wasn’t there.”

“That’s more or less how I felt when Pat tried to talk to me about things
in Munich.”

“But you didn’t tell me she did that!” Clare exclaimed.

“I hadn’t thought of its having any bearing on the present situation. And
as for our talking in general terms, we haven’t had much opportunity for
that, have we, Clare?”

“No. But it disturbs me somehow that Pat should do such a thing. One
wonders if that had something to do with her disappearance.”

“Why should it? There was no sort of argument, you know. She merely
said—” he stopped, then went on more deliberately—“she said how
wonderful you were to them both, and that home was as nice as it possibly
could be with only one parent there.”

“Oh, Greg, did she? And what,” asked Clare curiously, “did you reply to
that?”

“I just made a few general comments.” He frowned. “I said I was sure

that was so. I agreed that you were wonderful—to them.”
 “Did you have to make that pause there?”

“It wasn’t intentional. It didn’t imply anything derogatory to you,” he

protested. “I merely wanted to show that I went along with her statement
just as far as I could. I wanted to be fair to you, just as, I’m sure, you
wanted to be fair to me. I felt the less said, the better.”

“So did I,” Clare said slowly. “And the result was, I suppose, that it must
have seemed to them that the one thing no one would discuss frankly was
the most important subject in their lives.”

“Do you think that was how they viewed the—break-up? As the most
important subject in their lives?” He sounded uneasy.

“I don’t know, Greg. I’m just wondering. In fact, I’m beginning to

wonder how well I—perhaps we—really know our daughters at all.”

“Well, we’re going to know Pat a bit better after this morning,” he replied
drily. “She must have something to explain to us when we find her.”

“You’ll come in with me when I make enquiries at the hotel, won’t you,
Greg?” she said anxiously.

“Why, of course.” He looked surprised. “We’re in this together.”

 And the comfort of that stayed with her all the rest of the way, until they
stood before the hotel enquiry desk, where a very co-operative but puzzled
desk-clerk shook her head and said,

“Miss Collamore? No, we’ve never had anyone of that name here.
Certainly not in the last few months. I would remember. It’s an unusual
name.” And she produced a neatly kept register in proof of her statement.

In the first shock of disappointment Clare went so white that Greg

instinctively put his arm round her, which slightly surprised them both.

“Might she have used another name?” he asked quietly.

“Oh, Greg, of course she might!” Her glance of grateful admiration

actually made him tighten his clasp for a moment. “She’s very fair,”
explained Clare, turning back to the desk. “A very pretty girl, really. She
would have arrived late on Sunday evening in a hired car, and—”

“Oh, you mean Miss Foster!” The clerk’s face cleared.

“Miss—Foster?” repeated Clare, oddly dismayed to think of her child

rejecting even her name in order to put a complete barrier between herself
and the family she wanted to repudiate. “Is that the name she used? Could
we see her, please?”
 “I’m sorry—” the clerk was genuinely regretful, for she would have liked
to help this good-looking pair who seemed in such distress—“I’m afraid
she’s no longer here. She left this morning.”

“This—morning?” Utter dismay engulfed Clare again. “Where did she

go? Did she leave a forwarding address?”

“No. She had us call a taxi for her, and I heard her asking the man to
drive her to the station.”

“Did she have any visitor while she was here?” enquired Greg. “Any
contact that you can remember?”

“She stayed in her room a good deal. There was one visitor that I know
of. Quite a young girl, who evidently knew her as Miss Foster, because she
asked for her under that name. I was on duty at the time,” the woman
explained. “Yesterday afternoon it was.”

Greg and Clare exchanged a bewildered glance. Then Clare turned back
to the woman and said pleadingly, “And there’s nothing else at all that you
can tell us? She—she’s our daughter.”

“Nothing. I’m so very sorry. If you like to leave your address—?”

“Yes, of course.” Clare groped with trembling fingers for a card. “If you
hear anything else at all—or remember the slightest detail which might be
helpful—” She bit her lip, unable to complete the sentence.

“Yes. Yes, indeed,” the desk clerk said, and she watched compassionately
as the two went out slowly to the car once more.

“Is it any good making enquiries anywhere else?” Greg said doubtfully.
“The station, perhaps? Someone might remember her and which train she
took. She’s an outstanding girl, with that pretty hair and—and—”

Clare made a wordless little gesture which stopped him.

“We can try if you like,” she said huskily. “But I don’t think it’s any
good. I don’t think anything will be any good.”

He persisted, however, and they drove to the station, where he went in

and made painstaking enquiries. But, understandably enough, no one
remembered even a very pretty girl among the morning rush-hour crowd.

There was no need for him to say anything to Clare when he came back
to the car. She saw from his face that the enquiries had yielded no result.
And in silence he started the car and turned for home. Presently he realised
that she was crying, quietly and hopelessly, beside him.

“Oh, Clare dear—” There was a note of real anguish in his voice.
 “Don’t take any notice. Just drive on, Greg. There’s nothing you or
anyone can do. I’ll be better presently.”

But after a while he could stand it no longer, and he stopped the car in a
quiet road.

“Look, darling—” it was so long since he had called her darling that it
gave her a queer little lift of the heart, in spite of all her wretchedness—“I
know it’s desperately disappointing not to have found her. But at least we
know she’s well and safe. That woman had been speaking to her only an
hour or two before.”

“That’s just it! If we’d only been a few hours sooner!”

“We couldn’t have been,” he reminded her practically. “We didn’t know
the address in time, and evidently she left early.”

“But why, Greg, why? There’s something dreadful about the way she
persistently runs away from us. We love her, and we want only her good.
And yet she goes to these incredible lengths to get away from us. It’s as
though she were trying to escape something we represent.”

“No, no, it’s not that.” Troubledly he put his lips against her cheek for a
comforting moment. “God only knows what it is, Clare. But young things
do sometimes get a mad urge to ‘live their own lives’ as the phrase goes—”
 “She could have lived her own life from home,” Clare interrupted eagerly.
“I gave them both the utmost latitude. Truly, I did.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said soothingly. “But she had to have something
secret, it seems. At least it doesn’t appear to be an entanglement with a
man. It was a girl who came to see her. That’s queer when you come to
think of it. Who on earth could that have been?”

“I don’t know.” Clare leaned her head wearily but quite naturally against
him. “Someone who is going to help her to live the sort of life she wants, I
suppose. Oh, Greg, I’m so thankful to have you to discuss it with! I don’t
feel so bad now.”

She even managed to smile at him then, and he said, “That’s my girl!”
just as he used to when they were quite young and had surmounted some
difficulty together.

They drove on presently, the black depression lifting from Clare’s heart
as she realised that he was taking the utmost pains to present the situation
to her in a hopeful light. They did know Pat had come to no actual harm.
They did know that she meant to keep some tenuous contact with them,
even if only in the shortest of notes. And they did have each other as
support in this difficult moment of their family life.

This last, more than anything else, cheered Clare. As she sat beside Greg
and remembered his calling her darling and kissing her, however passingly,
she felt such an uprush of positive happiness that she wondered if it were
not almost wrong to be so happy when she still had not solved the mystery
of Pat’s disappearance.

“I’ll call in at the hotel to see if there’s a message by any chance, before I
drive you home,” he said, as they neared the centre of town.

“You don’t need to drive me home,” she assured him, anxious not to
appear to make demands upon him or his time. “I’ll come in with you, just
to see if there is anything, and then I can drive myself home.”

“Are you sure?”

“Dear Greg—” she laughed, and then wondered why she had used that
expression—“I’m doing it all the time!”

“Yes, of course,” he agreed hastily. And when they arrived at the Gloria
he parked the car and they went into the big hotel together.

With a nervous distaste for any more hotel enquiry desks, Clare let him
go on ahead, and as she watched him cross the big foyer she thought, “He’s
just as attractive as ever. More so, with that touch of grey in his hair. Oh,
Greg—!”

And then she felt her heart miss a couple of beats. For at that moment a
good-looking, beautifully dressed woman turned from the reception desk
and obviously gave some smiling exclamation at the sight of Greg. Clare
was too far away to hear what was said. But there was no mistaking the
possessive amusement and affection with which the woman reached up and
kissed his cheek.
 CHAPTER V

SOME instinct, quite inexplicable to her at the time, made Clare turn away
and stare with the utmost attention at a display of elegant handbags in a
showcase just behind her.

His life was his own now, she told herself, as she gazed unseeingly at a
gold mesh evening bag. Greg was entitled to kiss—or be kissed by—any
woman without reference to her. Only she didn’t want him to start
explaining or attempting to excuse what had happened. She could not
discuss it with him. So long as she need not talk about it she could go on
telling herself it was not her business. But if he said anything she simply
could not trust herself to make the right reply.

“If he thinks I just didn’t see—”

“Clare!” He was beside her now, just a trifle out of breath. “I’m sorry I
was so long. I ran into a friend from Munich who has just arrived in
London.”

“Did you really?” She managed to look at him with just exactly the right
amount of passing interest. Nothing more, nothing less. “There wasn’t any
message, of course?”
 “No, I’m afraid not. It wasn’t very likely, you know. Don’t be too
disappointed.”

“I’m not disappointed,” she assured him. And to herself she said, “It’s
just that all the joy’s gone out of me again. And not only for Pat.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive you home?”

“Quite sure, thank you. And I’m grateful for your coming with me this
morning.”

“It was the least I could do!”

She supposed it was. Even if a beautiful, well-dressed woman from

Munich also had claims upon his attention.

“Besides, I wanted to come,” he reminded her urgently. “And we still

have to decide what else we should do about Pat. I’ll come round this
evening—or tomorrow, shall I?”

“What else can we do?” She sounded bitterly dispirited again. “We know
she’s in no physical danger, as you said. She’s gone away of her own
accord. Presumably she will come back—if at all—in her own time.”

“Don’t talk like that!” he cried in a shocked tone. “As though you’re
almost resigned to her staying away.”
 “But if people choose to go away—and stay away—there isn’t very much
anyone else can do about it, is there, Greg?”

He looked uncomfortable, then a trifle resentful. “We could still go to the

police,” he insisted. “She’s under age and still the responsibility of her
parents.”

“Oh, those phrases don’t cut so much ice as when we were young,” Clare
exclaimed sadly. “Provided we have no reason to think she is in danger—”

“We don’t know if she is in danger or not,” he cried, suddenly reversing

all his comforting arguments of an hour ago. “We know she was physically
capable of marching out of that hotel in Westcliff just an hour or so before
we came in. But we don’t know where she is and why she went—or with
whom she went. Anything could have happened, even since then. We can’t
just leave things there. What’s the matter, Clare? It’s as though all the life
and determination had suddenly gone out of you.”

“Perhaps it has. I feel so—so tired and dispirited. I can’t think or make
plans any more. I’ll feel better when I’ve had some lunch, I expect. It’s late
and—”

“Stay and have lunch with me here,” he said impulsively.

But she experienced such a revulsion of feeling at the very idea of being
under the same roof as that woman—perhaps having to meet her—that she
cried, “Oh, no!” with such distasteful emphasis that he recoiled.

“Well, of course not if you feel so strongly about it,” he said stiffly.

“It isn’t that! Oh, Greg, I’m sorry.” Too late she put a placatory hand on
his arm, but her confused air gave little support to her apology. “It’s just
that I must go home to Marilyn now. She’ll be wondering what has
happened. She too has her anxieties, poor child.”

“Yes, of course.”

He followed her out of the hotel and saw her into the car. She wondered
if she imagined, or actually detected, a faint degree of relief in his manner
now that he was parting company with her.

“I’ll come this evening,” he assured her. “Or, if not, I’ll phone and we can
decide on a meeting tomorrow to discuss things.”

“Very well.” She managed to smile faintly before she drove away. But she
supposed that his “if not” covered alternative arrangements that he might
very well make to spend the evening with the woman who had greeted him
so warmly.

Marilyn was very sweet and sympathetic when she reached home. She
had lunch ready and listened with utmost attention to Clare’s account of the
abortive journey.
 “Oh, Mother, don’t be so unhappy about it. At least you know she is
perfectly well and doing whatever she is doing of her own accord. It’s
mysterious, rather than terrifying. Of course, I realise that you and Dad
must get to the bottom of it,” Marilyn added hastily, in the interests of
keeping her father on the spot. “But I really think you could relax a little
and not take it so hard. You look all in, you poor darling.”

“It was so unspeakably—disappointing.” Clare could not quite keep back

the tremor of distress in her voice, but at least Marilyn would attribute that
only to the scene at the Westcliff hotel, and not at all to anything which
happened later.

“I’m sure it was.” Marilyn gave her a well-meant if rather too hearty pat
on the shoulder. “I know you don’t like me to criticise Dad, but I don’t
think it would have hurt him to take you out and give you a spanking lunch,
to cheer you up.”

“He offered to,” Clare said quickly, in all fairness. “He wanted me to stay
and have lunch with him at the Gloria.”

“Oh, Mother! Why didn’t you?”

“I—wanted to get back to you. I thought you would be waiting anxiously

and—”
 “But, darling, how silly of you!” Marilyn looked really vexed, for it
seemed to her that this had been a golden opportunity lost. “You could have
phoned me quite easily.”

“Well, I suppose I could.”

“Of course you could. You probably disappointed poor old Dad badly. He
is making some effort to retrieve his position as head of the family. I think
you should encourage him a bit. It’s awful to make an effort to do
something difficult and then have it brushed off, just as you’re feeling
hopeful but unsure.”

“I don’t think your father is feeling that,” Clare exclaimed defensively.

“Well, I do,” replied Marilyn firmly. “And the onlooker sees most of the
game. You know what I think you should do? I think you should phone him
now and say you hated disappointing him over lunch, particularly now you
find I wasn’t at all worried, and how about his taking you out to dinner
tonight instead?”

“Oh no!” cried Clare.

“Why not?” Marilyn opened her eyes wide. “I bet you he’d like it. He’s
all on his own and—”

“No,” said Clare, before she could stop herself. “He isn’t all on his own.”
 “What do you mean?” Marilyn was genuinely appalled. “You don’t mean
he’s brought some other woman along with him?”

“Of course not! What a dreadful way to put it, Mari. But some very good
friend of his has turned up from Munich and was booking in at his hotel. I
—I was waiting while he went to the desk to see if there were any
messages, and I saw them greet each other. She was very good-looking,
very well-dressed and—” Clare swallowed slightly—“very possessive.”

“Oh, crumbs! Mrs. Curtiss, I suppose,” exclaimed Marilyn in disgust.

Clare looked at her younger daughter, resisted temptation for a moment

and then finally said,

“I despise myself for even discussing it. But, as you seem to have had
information from Pat which I haven’t, who exactly is Mrs. Curtiss?”

“According to Pat, she’s quite unimportant, Mother. No one for you to

worry about.”

“I’m not worrying,” replied Clare quickly and coldly.

“At the same time,” went on Marilyn firmly, “from what Pat said, I think
it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the family to gather round and organise
something of a rescue operation.”
 “Mari!” exclaimed Clare distastefully.

“Oh, Mother, don’t be so well-bred and dignified! As though you don’t

know, just as well as I do, that Dad’s the natural target for man-eating
tigresses. We’re all used to him, I dare say, and perhaps we don’t see why
other people find him so attractive—”

“I know exactly why other people find him attractive,” interjected Clare
drily. “I find him attractive myself.”

“Well, so do I, of course,” Marilyn admitted. “But in a different way from

the outsider. It’s not always easy to have someone like that in the family.
And both Pat and I do see that life couldn’t have been smooth for you or—

“It was once.” The words were forced from Clare involuntarily. “That’s
the sad thing, Mari. For years it was the happiest marriage you can possibly
imagine. I—don’t know quite what went wrong.”

“I suppose one seldom does,” said Marilyn solemnly.

“Oh, I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this,” exclaimed her
mother.

“Because I’m the most natural person for you to talk to,” replied Marilyn
simply. “Pat or me. After all, we’re part of both you and Dad. We ought to
have some idea of how you both tick.”
 Clare laughed at that. The first time she had done so since the
conversation began. And as she ruffled Marilyn’s hair with an affectionate
hand, she said, “You’re such a comfort, even though you’re still such a
child in many ways. Go on explaining' your father to me.”

Marilyn grinned, and looked remorseful, for some reason Clare could not
divine.

“I wasn’t really going to say much more, except that we just have to
accept the fact that Dad’s the kind lots of women find attractive. After all, I
suppose that was why you married him?”

“I suppose it was,” said Clare, and again there was that unexpected flash
of amusement in her face.

“You’re so pretty when you do that,” remarked her daughter. “I think Dad
was quite surprised to see how pretty you still are, when he came to take a
good look at you again.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re prejudiced,” exclaimed Clare. But all the same,
her colour deepened slightly and she was aware of an indefinable lift of her
spirits.

Marilyn regarded her with some satisfaction. Then she said quite
deliberately, “Mother, are you prepared to have Mrs. Curtiss just snitch
Dad from under our noses?”
 “Marilyn, what dreadful expressions you use! As though—as though it’s
something like shop-lifting.”

“Well, that’s what she is.” Marilyn was rather pleased with the
expression. “A matrimonial shoplifter. There are plenty of them, looking
for other people’s husbands and fathers. And if people won’t look after
their property—”

“Stop it!” her mother exclaimed sharply. “I won’t have you talk like that.
When your father and I realised that our marriage wouldn’t work, we
separated with at least some dignity and—”

“Oh, Mother! What good is dignity when one’s miserable, or—” She
stopped in dismay. For the first time in her life she saw her mother bury her
face in her hands.

“Oh, I’m so sorry—” immediately Marilyn was a schoolgirl, dismayed,

completely at a loss. “Mother, don’t cry. I—I’ve never seen you cry like
that!” She put out a timid, questing hand to touch her mother’s arm. But
Clare exclaimed agitatedly,

“Don’t, darling. I’ll stop in a minute. Oh, it’s ridiculous to behave like
this. I’m sorry. It—it’s the anxiety about Pat. Mostly,” she added, again as
though the word were forced from her. Then she got up from her chair and,
leaving a scared and guilty Marilyn behind her, she went across the hall
and into her bedroom, where she closed the door.
 For two whole minutes, Marilyn sat there, irresolution plain upon her
face. Then, with the courage—or obstinacy—found only in the optimist
with the one-track mind, she also closed the sitting-room door firmly and,
picking up the telephone, she rapidly dialled the number of the Gloria
Hotel.

Her good angel must have been at her very elbow, she decided. For not
only did the hotel come through immediately on the line, but within
seconds she had been connected with the right extension and her father’s
voice said sharply, “Yes? Collamore speaking.

“Dad, it’s Marilyn.” She spoke quietly, with her hand cupped round her
mouth. “I can’t say much. But do you want to do something very kind and
very clever this evening?”

“Very—? What do you mean?”

“I can’t explain. Will you please just take my advice. It’s more important
than you know. Will you please ask Mother out to dinner tonight, and insist
that she comes. Don’t ask me why and, whatever you do, don’t mention
this to her.”

“But I must know a little more than—”

“Thank you so much,” said Marilyn softly, and rang off.

 Then, with the air of a kitten who had drunk all the cream but found it
slightly indigestible, she gathered together the lunch dishes and went into
the kitchen to do the washing-up.

She was just hanging the tea-towel on the line when she heard her
mother’s door open again, and Clare came out, looking quite composed and
very much herself.

“Oh, Mari dear, I didn’t mean to leave all that for you. After you got it all
ready, I might at least have cleared it up.” She came over and kissed her
daughter’s cheek lightly.

“That’s all right. There wasn’t much to do.” Marilyn’s tone was off-hand,
but she returned her mother’s kiss warmly.

“You’re such a good little daughter.” Clare smiled at her. “And rather a
clever one too, I sometimes think. Mari, I’m going to take your advice.”

“My—advice?” Marilyn swallowed hard.

“Yes. You’re either very right or very wrong. I’m not sure which, and
perhaps I’d better find out.” Clare was still smiling in that reflective way.
“I’m going to ring up Greg and ask him if he’d like to take me out to
dinner tonight.”
 “Oh—yes,” said Marilyn, feeling a little as though someone had slipped a
small lump of ice down her spine.

“You don’t sound quite so enthusiastic now.” Her mother gave her an
amused, half-puzzled glance.

“I am enthusiastic!” Marilyn declared. “I think it’s a wonderful idea. But

you don’t think—” she glanced at the kitchen clock—“he might be having
an afternoon nap or something? I mean, perhaps a little later would be
better?”

“Greg isn’t at all the afternoon nap type,” Clare laughed, genuinely
amused. “And he wouldn’t thank you for making him sound quite such an
elderly gentleman.”

“Do something!” Marilyn implored her guardian angel mentally. “Please

do something!”

And, as though in celestial answer to her appeal, at that very moment the
telephone bell rang.

“Oh—” Marilyn could hardly control her gasp of almost superstitious

relief. “There’s the phone,” she said unnecessarily, and she pretended to be
drying damp hands, so that her mother would be the one to go and answer
it.
 She followed, however, to the sitting-room door, in time to hear her
mother say, “Hello?” Then, just as she prepared to slip tactfully away, she
heard her mother’s voice change entirely and she cried, “Pat! Is that you,
dear? Pat—Pat, answer me!”

For a moment or two longer Clare shook the receiver and repeated Pat’s
name. Then she dialled the operator and asked distractedly if the call could
be traced.

“You can’t? It was a call-box? But you can’t tell which?—Oh, what sort
of a service is this?—No, I’m sorry. I wasn’t criticising you. It’s just—
Well, I’m sorry.”

She rang off and turned in agitation to Marilyn, who stood in the
doorway, still dangling a kitchen towel and looking petrified with dismay
and bewilderment.

“That was Pat! She thought it was you replying—she said your name in a
cautious sort of way. Then when she heard it was me she hung up! She
hung up because I was on the line! Oh, what have I ever done to make her
feel like that? She’s my child—I love her—and she doesn’t even want to
speak to me. Has she grown to hate me or something?”

“Oh, Mother, no. Of course not.” Marilyn moved at last and came
forward a little stiffly into the room, not knowing how on earth to tackle
this unexpected complication.
 “She asked if it were you. Why did she do that, Mari? What did she want
that she didn’t mind asking you, but she wouldn’t ask me? Think, dear—
think. There must be an explanation somewhere, and it’s as though you
were somehow nearer to it than I am. Haven’t you any idea at all why she
is behaving like this?”

Greatly shaken, and feeling a criminal, Marilyn slowly shook her head.
Then once more she was rescued by the ringing of the telephone bell.

“Oh, she’s trying again!” Clare snatched up the receiver and said in the
most loving appealing tone, “Darling, please—” and then, “Oh—oh, Greg!
No, I didn’t know it was you. Oh, well—” she gave a shaky little laugh
—“you can take it as meant if you like. As a matter of fact, I thought it was
Pat.—Yes, she phoned a few minutes ago, but she rang off when I replied.
It was like a slap in the face. I thought this was her ringing back.—What?
Yes, of course it was a disappointment.—No, no! Not in that sense. I’m
terribly glad to hear from you.—Oh, Greg, what did you say?”

Marilyn, who was shamelessly watching and listening, saw her mother’s
face change, as though a light had been suddenly lit inside a lamp.

“Tonight? Why, Greg, I’d like it very much.—Yes, of course I would. I

what? Seemed off-brushing?—Oh, because I wouldn’t stay to lunch, you
mean? I’m terribly sorry. I was tired and worried. I didn’t mean to speak
that way. Will you come about seven and have a drink here? Then we could
go on wherever you like. What about taking Mari too?—Oh, wait a minute.
She’s making violent signs.”

Clare held the receiver away and said, “It’s your father, dear. Imagine! He
rang up to suggest we should dine together tonight. I can’t leave you all
alone. Would you like—”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” exclaimed Marilyn. “What a ridiculous idea! He

wants you to himself—and quite rightly too. Anyway, I’m tired. I was
going to bed early with a book. Besides, Pat might ring again, and if I
answer she might tell me something.”

“That’s true!” The argument appealed to Clare irresistibly. “Well, if you

really don’t mind, dear?”

“I told you, earlier on, I think it’s the best idea possible.”

“She’s being sweet about it.” Smiling, Clare spoke again into the
telephone. “She insists that she wants to stay at home, and of course it’s
true that someone should be here in case Pat rings again. She might talk to
Mari when she wouldn’t talk to me—to us. Mari is specially easy to talk
to.”

Clare smiled across at her daughter, who looked slightly self-conscious.

Then she went on, “I don’t know what I’d do without her, Greg.—You want
to speak to her, you say—Oh, you mean when you come this evening to
fetch me. Yes, of course, you’ll have plenty of opportunity then. Greg, I’m
so glad you telephoned. The odd thing is that I nearly phoned you with the
same idea.—What’s that?” She laughed and coloured charmingly. “Well,
yes, we did often think the same things simultaneously in—in the old days.
Till seven o’clock, then.”

She put down the receiver slowly and she was smiling and looking like a
different woman from the one who had replaced the receiver after Pat’s
call.

“Wasn’t that extraordinary?” she said musingly. “That he should have the
idea of phoning me with the dinner suggestion just as I intended to do the
same thing.”

“Extraordinary,” agreed Marilyn nobly.

“Of course I know that as far as I was concerned the idea came from
you.”

“Yes,” said Marilyn, and tried not to look a trifle smug.

Her mother laughed.

“You minx!” she said almost gaily. “If I didn’t know you better I’d think
you somehow prompted him, too.”
 “Oh, Mother, what an ideal” cried Marilyn reproachfully.

“Darling, I was only teasing you! I’m happy we did both think of it. As
though—as though we were more in tune again.”

“That thought pleases you, doesn’t it?” Marilyn’s regard was almost
maternal in its affectionate indulgence.

“It does, Mari. I won’t pretend anything else. It even makes me feel that
somehow this puzzling business with Pat will turn out all right in the end.
That there’s some explanation that will make us all feel relieved and happy.
Illogical, I know, but—”

“No. You’re very likely right,” Marilyn assured her eagerly. “Perhaps
she’ll phone this evening while you and Dad are out. I’ll do my best to get
some real information out of her if she does.”

“Do, darling. Your father says he specially wants to talk to you a bit when
he comes tonight. I think he feels he hasn’t really seen much of you. So I’ll
make it my business to be dressing still when he comes. You give him a
drink and have a chat with him. He would like that; and so would you,
wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” said Marilyn because it was impossible to say anything

else. “But don’t leave us too long, will you? It’s you he really wants to see.
And anyway, I don’t know why, but I feel a bit self-conscious with him
when you aren’t there. I suppose it’s because I’ve seen so little of him in the
last year.”

“Mari dear!” Clare was a good deal shocked at what she took to be
evidence that her younger daughter had grown away from her father. “You
need never feel like that with either of us!”

“Oh, not with you,” Marilyn laughed protestingly.

“But not with your father either. He loves you dearly, and thinks you’re
such a clever, lively girl. I believe he finds you something of an attractive
little enigma. He said he wonders sometimes just what you’re up to—”

“When did he say that?” enquired Marilyn quickly.

“Just now, on the phone. But he meant it admiringly, you know. Have a
nice talk with him this evening.”

“I will,” said Marilyn with a certain lack of enthusiasm. But Clare thought
it better not to comment further on that.

In actual fact, Marilyn was divided between anxiety and a considerable

amount of hope. There was no doubt that her parents were, for the moment
at any rate, drifting more towards each other. That Mrs. Curtiss was here in
London to make trouble was, Marilyn thought, equally obvious. And she
could not disguise from herself that she was becoming dangerously
involved in ever-narrowing circles.

If only events moved quickly—in the direction she and Pat wanted, of
course—all might yet be well. But meanwhile, why had Pat thought it
necessary to take the risk of telephoning? Did she doubt Jerry Penrose’s
reliability as a messenger? There was no reason for her to do so, Marilyn
reflected. He had done his part nobly. And she herself had dealt with him
splendidly. She experienced no false modesty about that.

Possibly, of course, it was just that Pat was longing for a cosy chat about
recent developments; in which case, she would very possibly try again that
evening. Nothing could be better, with the parents both out, thought
Marilyn. And the possibility of a really long and informative chat with her
sister made her feel so confident and cheerful that she even looked ready to
deal with the enquiries which obviously trembled on her father’s lips when
she admitted him that evening.

“Come in.” Marilyn, smiling hospitably, held open the door for him. “Oh,
you do look distinguished! I’d forgotten how good you looked in a dinner
jacket. Mother’s nearly ready. She said I was to look after you and get you
a drink.” She had already led the way into the sitting-room and now crossed
to the table where drinks were set out. “What will you have? Whisky?—
Sherry?”
 “Stop playing the nervous hostess.” Her father came up behind her and
took hold of her quite gently by her upper arms. Then, bending his head, he
lightly kissed the side of her cheek and asked, “Exactly what are you up
to?”

“Oh, Daddy!” As the childish term of address slipped from her, she turned
suddenly in his arms and hugged him. “You’re not cross, are you?”

“No, I’m not cross. Only intensely curious. I’m a bit past the age of
mysterious half-whispered conversations over the phone. Particularly with
my nearly grown-up daughter. As you see, I’ve carried out my instructions
to the letter, but now I’d like—”

“Oh, hush!” Quickly she put her hand against his lips and was both
relieved and charmed that he immediately kissed her fingers lightly.
“Mother has no idea—and she mustn’t. But she was so miserable about
having unintentionally brushed you off at lunchtime—”

“Was she?” He looked pleased and a little amused.

“Yes. And I wanted her to phone and suggest dinner instead. But she
turned scared and on her dignity, because she thought you probably wanted
to go out with Mrs. Curtiss.”

“Linda! How did your mother know about Linda?” He looked rather put
out.
 “Well, she saw the meeting between you at your hotel, didn’t she?”
returned Marilyn innocently.

“Oh, did she?”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” It was not part of Marilyn’s intention to

create any feeling of discomfort on either side. “If I did interfere a little, it
doesn’t matter now, does it? What is important is that Mother’s very happy
to be going out with you. She’s busy making herself look her best. And
unless you want me and Pat to hate you, it had better be a good evening.”

“Stop threatening me!” Her father looked both amused and annoyed.
“And what’s this about you and Pat? Are you two—”

“Ssh! Here’s Mother,” whispered Marilyn urgently. And then, aloud,

“Whisky, did you say?”

“Whisky. On the rocks,” he agreed absently.

He turned as Clare came into the room, radiant in a peacock green

cocktail dress which gave the most wonderful warmth and significance to
her own colouring.

“Clare! How lovely. You always ought to wear brilliant colours. I used to
tell you so—remember?”
 “Well, I did think this was a good colour for me.” She stood before him,
smiling a little shyly. “Not quite my age-group perhaps, but—”

“Nonsense! It’s the pastels that are ageing. Doesn’t she look a beauty,
Mari?”

“Yes, of course.” Marilyn glanced over her shoulder. “You both look
splendid, to tell the truth.”

“No wonder we like that child,” observed Greg gaily, as he raised his
glass to Clare. “Do one’s children often pay one such nice compliments as
they grow up?”

“Only if they’re deserved,” Marilyn informed him. “But if you stay

around a bit you’ll find out for yourself, won’t you?”

Neither of her parents took this up. They stayed chatting for a few
minutes longer, then they both kissed Marilyn warmly, and went off
together with an air of expecting to enjoy themselves. Only when she heard
the lift door clang did Marilyn throw herself into an armchair, put her feet
up on a stool, and observe to the empty room, “Good work!”

She turned on the radio low, she hummed contentedly to herself, and with
an inward conviction that everything was now going her way, she waited
almost confidently for the ring of the telephone bell.
 Afterwards she realised she must actually have dozed a little, for it was
almost an hour later that she was roused by persistent ringing.

“Oh!” Wide awake now, she reached for the telephone. But then the ring
was repeated, and she realised suddenly that it was the front door bell and
not the telephone which had roused her.

“Who on earth—? Pat would never risk—?”

But, in spite of the absurdity of the idea, she rushed to the front door and
snatched it open, almost expecting to see Pat standing outside. What she
did see was a youngish policeman who enquired,

“Does Miss Patricia Collamore live here?”

“Why, yes. Yes, she does.” Marilyn was shaken. “But she’s not in at
present.”

“When are you expecting her in?”

“Pm not. I mean, she’s—staying with friends.”

“Oh, I see. Could you give me the address, please?”

“I’m afraid I can’t.” With some difficulty, Marilyn concealed the fact that
she was now feeling very frightened. “She was—was going from one
friend to another. The way people do, you know.”

The policeman looked for a moment as though in his experience this was
not at all what people did. But then he stolidly took that in his stride and
enquired,

“Would you know if she’d lost a handbag recently?”

“A handbag? Not—” Marilyn swallowed—“to my knowledge. But then I

haven’t been in touch for—” again she swallowed—“a day or two. Do you
mean that her handbag has been stolen or something?”

“I mean that a handbag was found late this afternoon with very little in it
but a passport in her name. I was able to check with the Passport Office and
get her address, and that’s why I’m here.”

“Her handbag was—found?” repeated Marilyn almost in a whisper.

“Where was it found?”

“On the river towpath, down near Barnes Bridge.”

 CHAPTER VI

FROM time to time Marilyn had experienced some bad moments since she
and Pat had embarked on their mad plan, but nothing could compare with
her dismayed reactions as she now stood staring at the young policeman
outside her front door.

“Her—her handbag was found on the towpath?” she stammered. “But Pat
would never—do anything—like that. There wasn’t the least reason. She—
we—”

“Oh, there’s no suggestion of suicide,” the policeman assured her

promptly. “Don’t go scaring yourself with ideas like that. The fact that there
was little but her passport in the bag suggests that someone else had been
through it. Someone pinched the bag, took anything of value that was in it
and then threw it away; probably from a speeding car. It happens every day
of the week,” he added, with a resigned sigh for the standards of honesty
prevailing in an era when crime and illness are so naively confused.

“Oh—Marilyn gave a great gasp of relief—“of course! I hadn’t thought

of that.”
 “The loss hasn’t been reported yet, and we’d like to get in touch with
your sister as soon as possible, to establish the facts of the theft and her
ownership of the passport. You say she’s with friends, but you’re not sure
which friends?”

Marilyn nodded cautiously.

“Perhaps you could give me a few suggestions?”

“I would if I could.” Marilyn suddenly spoke with a great show of

candour. “But, to tell you the truth, there was a bit of a family row and she
went off in rather a huff. We’re not quite sure where she is at the moment.
But if she’s lost her handbag she’s bound to contact us soon, isn’t she?”

“One would think so.” The policeman looked as though he found the
story unsatisfactory. “Do you and your sister live here on your own?”

“Oh, no. My mother lives here too. But she’s out at present,” added
Marilyn, quickly forestalling the next question which she saw coming.

“Are you expecting her home tonight?”

“Yes, of course!”

“Then if I call again in the morning—”

 “It might be better if I did any calling,” Marilyn interrupted hastily. “My
mother is the nervous type—has a rather weak heart,” she added in a
sudden flight of fancy which slightly surprised herself. “I don’t want her
upset in any way. She’s worried enough about my sister as it is, and if she
had the sort of shock you gave me when you told me Pat’s handbag had
been found she might collapse or something. I think my sister is almost
sure to phone tonight or tomorrow. Suppose I look in at the police station as
soon as I have news? Wouldn’t that be the better plan?”

“Perhaps. For the time being, anyway,” was the not entirely reassuring
reply. “We’d certainly like to have some news of your sister.”

“So would we!” replied Marilyn with a fervour which seemed to strike
him as genuine.

Then, having told her at which police station to report, he went away,
leaving Marilyn frantic with enforced inaction and the inability to think of
any way in which she could possibly contact Pat.

“Oh, why doesn’t she phone?” Marilyn exclaimed aloud. “She must be
desperate if her bag has been pinched. What money she had must have
been in it, and she hasn’t got much she could sell or pawn. Her watch,
perhaps—or her bracelet. But what would she get for those, even if she
knew how to set about raising money on them! Why doesn’t she phone?
Surely anything would be better than being on one’s own, practically
penniless?”
 Marilyn glanced at the clock, was astonished to find that it was still not
yet quite nine, and then tried to console herself with the reflection that there
was still plenty of time for Pat to telephone. Undoubtedly, it had been the
loss of her handbag which had driven her to risk that earlier call, and
possibly the fact that her mother replied had shaken her nerve for any
further effort. On the other hand, one would have expected sheer
desperation to drive her to make a second attempt.

“Of course,” thought Marilyn, “if she did manage to raise a few pounds
on her bits of jewellery she could hang out for a day or two. In fact—” a
light of partial relief began to dawn upon her—“in fact, until she could
contact me through the garage. Yes, that’s what it is, of course! Why didn’t
I think of it before? She’s managed to make some sort of arrangement to
tide her over tonight and she’ll have an S.O.S. waiting for me at the garage
in the morning. She’ll guess that after Jerry Penrose’s message I won’t wait
until Wednesday, as originally planned. Even though she doesn’t know I’ve
heard of her further problem, she’ll still hope and expect that I’ll go
tomorrow.”

She even toyed with the idea of rushing off to the garage then and there.
But the likelihood that it would now be closed, and the strong possibility
that even now Pat might telephone, restrained her. Instead, she spent a few
minutes trying to send some sort of thought-wave to her sister.
 “Oh, Pat, phone, you idiot!” she thought with angry intensity. “It’s quite
safe. I’m here alone. Come on—phone!”

This form of communication, however, yielded no results, and presently

Marilyn gave up the effort and tried instead to achieve some sort of calm
and peace of mind.

“Now it’s all right,” she told herself, speaking aloud for extra
reassurance. “No need to get jittery. Pat’s found a way round her temporary
difficulty and is now just quietly waiting until I pick up her message at the
garage. If she can be calm about it, surely I can! Except for the business of
the bag, it’s all really working out very much as we planned it. Why, we’ve
even got Mother and Dad out together enjoying themselves.” And at the
thought of her own part in this satisfactory arrangement, Marilyn cheered
up immensely.

She was not the only one whose spirits were lifted by the elaborately
arranged party of pleasure. To Clare, as she glanced across the table at Greg
in the discreetly expensive restaurant to which he had taken her, it seemed
that for the first time for years they were quietly happy in each other’s
company.

“As though,” she thought, watching him as he studied the wine list, “as
though we had grown a little wiser and mellower, and could look back on
past conflicts with more understanding of each other. Does he feel like that,
I wonder?”
 He looked up just then, smiled as he caught her glance upon him and said,
“Do you still prefer a Moselle to a Rhine wine?”

“Oh, Greg, what a long time since you asked me that!” she laughed. “I
don’t mind. Anything would taste good tonight.”

The words were out before she could stop them, but as the waiter came up
at that moment to take the order, she hoped Greg might have missed the last
comment.

However, as soon as they were alone again, and before she could possibly
start on any other subject, he asked curiously, “What made you say that,
Clare?”

“Say what?” She picked up the menu and pretended to study it intently.

“Are you having second thoughts about your choice of meal?” She could
hear the hint of laughter in his voice; but it was the good-humoured
laughter with a touch of indulgence in it which belonged to the early days.
No hint of the bitter mockery which had punctuated so many of their
discussions in the last months together.

“No, no. I think we’ve chosen very well.” She felt confused, but managed
to look up at him.
 “If you feel that anything would taste good tonight, we couldn’t go far
wrong, could we, Clare? What made you say that?”

“I don’t know.” Then she thought that was cowardly and ungenerous, and
so she added deliberately, “Yes, I do. It’s so nice to be quietly happy in each
other’s company.”

He was startled, she saw, and a little nonplussed to find a ready answer.
Then something essentially generous in him must have responded to the
generous candour in her and he replied,

“Like old times, you mean? I suppose I was feeling that too.”

“Not just the nostalgia of old times,” she said, and her breath came rather
fast, for this was a tricky conversation in which one could so easily put a
foot wrong. “There’s a sort of—of mellowness about it. As though perhaps
one had learned a little wisdom.”

“But I hope we have!” He responded to that a trifle too heartily, as though

determined not to read more into the words than their exact face value. “I
look at you now and wonder how I found it so easy to quarrel with you.”
And he laughed, like a man looking back on adolescent follies.

“Oh, Greg, do you? I was thinking much the same about you!”
 Hope flared up in her heart, but was extinguished almost immediately by
his continuing, with a sort of reflective amusement, “The answer being, of
course, that we’re no longer on top of each other, irritating each other by
every difference which divides us. Curious what a detached and civilised
view one can take of people one doesn’t have to see every day.”

She wanted to reply coldly and caustically, and at one time she would
have done so. Instead, she called on some of the wisdom she had culled so
painfully during this lonely year, and said, with a touch of mischievous
amusement,

“Was that how you were regarding me when you smiled at me just now?
With a detached and civilised view?”

“Well—” he was startled again, she saw, and then a good deal amused in
his turn. “Not exactly,” he conceded. But instead of trying to explain
himself further, he merely said, “That certainly is the most becoming dress
I’ve seen you in for years, Clare! Does anyone tell you nowadays how
really beautiful you are?”

“No one.” She shook her head ruefully. “The girls sometimes offer me an
affectionate half compliment, but nothing calculated to turn the head of a
middle-aged parent.”

“What a way to describe yourself!”

 “Strictly true, nevertheless.”

“Of me too, of course.” He made a slight face. But then he smiled with
sudden reminiscent satisfaction and remarked, “Marilyn’s a funny little
cuss, isn’t she? But at least she thinks we’re attractive. Extraordinarily
gratifying to be attractive in the eyes of one’s own offspring, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is. Even if we rate as attractive failures.”

“Oh, Clare! You used that word of us before. Do you really think we have
to wear that particular hair-shirt?” he exclaimed impatiently.

“It’s not incumbent on you, if you don’t feel it applies,” she assured him,
in much the same tone she would have used to reassure Marilyn about
something. “I only know that I wish I’d somehow managed to supply for
my two girls the sort of unquestioned security my mother supplied for me.”

“Your mother?” It was all too obvious that he had not even thought of her
mother for years. “Why, Clare, she wasn’t half the personality you are! If I
may say so without offence, she was a quite ordinary, conventional sort of
woman, whereas you are really something quite special. You and your
parents were cut from an entirely different piece of cloth.”

“And yet—” Clare smiled reflectively and a little sadly—“they provided

me with a background as secure as tomorrow’s dawn. Think of that! Wasn’t
that just something? I wish I’d realised it in time to tell them I knew. As
secure as tomorrow’s dawn,” she repeated half to herself.

He stared at her in something like dismay. Then at last he said, as though

the words were forced from him, “And nothing was ever so secure for you
again?”

“Oh, Greg, no! I wouldn’t say that! Those days in the flat in Hampstead
were just the same, because you always had the answer to everything and
made me feel that nothing could go very far wrong. We had to budget so
carefully! And then we miscalculated over the measurements of the dining-
room carpet and it was far more than we expected—do you remember? But
you rushed through an unexpected commission in the nick of time, and
there was even enough left over to buy linoleum for the bathroom. Do you
remember that?”

“I’d—forgotten,” he said slowly. “But I do remember now.”

“It was such fun!” She was smiling brilliantly now and her colour had
risen. “There was that little shop at the bottom of the hill which sold just
everything, and the old woman there was so helpful when I was
inexperienced and didn’t know much about shopping and cooking. She
used to give me reams of advice about all sorts of things. There was always
someone to bother about one and tell one in those days. Even the night Pat
was born—”
 “God, was I scared!” he interjected with a reminiscent grin.

“So was I, to tell the truth.”

“Well, you had some reason to be! I was just the music hall joke type of
expectant father who went to pieces.”

“Oh, you didn’t, Greg! You were marvellous and boosted my morale like
mad.”

“All sheer bluff, I assure you.”

“And you fetched Mrs.—what was her name? Ellis—Mrs. Ellis from next
door, and she knew exactly what to do. I tell you, someone always knew
what to do and wanted to help then! Oh, they were wonderful days!”

“Were they, Clare? In spite of the pinching and scrimping?”

“Yes, of course. I try not to think of them now, because—” She stopped
suddenly and stared at him, hardly able to believe that they were speaking
to each other with such frankness.

“Why, dear? Why do you try not to think of them?”

“Because—” she tried to steady her voice and failed—“because it makes

me—cry.”
 “Oh, Clare!” He put out his hand and covered hers as it lay there on the
table. And when she glanced up he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
They seemed to him in that moment just as young and scared as they had
been on the night Pat was born, and the expression in them caught at his
heart as nothing had done for years.

He drew breath to voice the impulsive words that rose to his lips. But
even as he did so he saw her expression change. She looked not at him but
past him, and the spell was broken; so rudely that it was a moment before
he registered the fact that astonishment, alarm and anger had succeeded that
tremulous look.

“What is it?” he exclaimed, as though he would still grasp at a vanishing

dream. “Don’t look like that. What is it?”

“That girl!” gasped Clare. “The one who’s going out of the door now. She
was wearing Pat’s bracelet.”

“She couldn’t have been!”

“She was, I tell you! I’d know it anywhere.”

“It must be a similar one. Bought at the same shop, probably.”

“No, no. I had it made for her. Go after the girl, Greg, and ask how she
came by it.”
 “I can’t possibly do such a thing! She’s a stranger.”

“What does that matter? That’s Pat’s bracelet, I tell you. What sort of a
parent are you? If you won’t go, I will!” And she half rose to her feet.

“No. Stay where you are! I’ll go,” he said, perhaps stung by the slight on
him as a parent. And he quickly followed in the wake of the rather flashy-
looking girl Clare had indicated.

She was out of the restaurant by now, and so was her escort, so that Clare
had no means of seeing how the encounter went. She wished now that she
had gone too—she who had the conviction Greg lacked that the bracelet
was unquestionably Pat’s.

It was a few minutes before he came back, and she guessed from his
heightened colour that the scene had not been a pleasant one.

“Well?” she said sharply.

“She told me to mind my own business. Not unnaturally.”

“But you didn’t leave it at that?” she cried, dismayed.

“No, of course not. I explained the thing had once belonged to my

daughter, whom I was anxious to trace.”
 “And what did she say to that?”

“That I was surely old enough to think up a better line of approach than
that,’ ’replied Greg drily. “Then her escort wanted to know if I were
looking for a fight, and finally they both got into a car and drove off.”

“Oh, Greg! D-did you take the number of the car?”

“I did, as a matter of fact,” he said, looking slightly sheepish. “But

honestly, Clare, I think the whole thing is a mare’s nest. You had no more
than a glimpse of the bracelet, surely?”

“I saw it quite clearly. She put up her hand to her hair for a moment, just
as she was passing our table,”

“Then if you’re absolutely certain there’s no question of a duplicate—”

“How could there be a duplicate? I had it specially made, I tell you!”

“But whoever made it might well have repeated the design, since it was
so attractive and successful. The original idea was yours. But there was
nothing to prevent the maker of the thing copying it for someone else.”

“I—never thought of that.” Clare was shaken. “Alternatively, if Pat got

low in funds she might have sold the bracelet.”
 “I don’t think she would do that,” Clare exclaimed, instinctively rejecting
the idea that her daughter would sell anything so personal for the sole
purpose of staying away from home a little longer. “No. Perhaps, as you
say, it wasn’t Pat’s bracelet after all. I’m sorry, Greg, if I gave you a nasty
job unnecessarily.”

“It doesn’t matter. All in the life of a parent,” he said, and grinned.

She smiled faintly too, and after a while they talked of other things. But
they could not recapture the lost magic of that moment when they had
looked at each other across the table and he had smiled and she had almost
shed tears for the days when they were young and happy together.

On the way home he said, “What are we going to do about Pat now? Do
we let her go on playing us up until she decides in her own good time to
come home and explain herself, or do we admit that we’re still scared and
go to the police about her?”

“I still don’t think it’s the moment to go to the police.” Clare frowned
consideringly. “We have her own statement in her own handwriting that
she is well and safe. And only this afternoon she did telephone, 'even if she
cut off again just as soon as I spoke to her. I think we should give her a day
or two longer, don’t you?—If you can stay that long, I mean.”

“Stay? Of course, I’m staying here until she’s found,” retorted Greg with
a grim determination she found comforting. “Though I’m not quite sure
that I shall be able to keep myself from wringing her neck when she is
found,” he added.

“You won’t even want to,” Clare told him with a smile. “You won’t be
able to keep yourself from embracing her with relief and thankfulness.”

“I don’t know so much about that! I’m not as forgiving as you are,
Clare.”

“Aren’t you?” She turned and smiled at him as he drew the car to a
standstill outside the block of flats. “I think you are. It seems to me that I
was often the stupid, hard, unyielding one.”

“Forget it. That isn’t the way I remember you at all.”

“No? How do you remember me, Greg, when you look back over all
those years—the difficult ones as well as the lovely ones?”

“Sometimes in a way that’s not too good for my peace of mind,” he told
her, lightly but uninformatively. “Good night, my dear, and thank you for
coming out with me.”

“Thank you for asking me, Greg. In spite of the anxiety about Pat, it was
—lovely.”

“Will you come again?”

 “If you ask me—yes.”

“I shall ask you,” he said. And he stood and looked after her until she
entered the block. She turned just before the door swung to behind her, and
he smiled and raised his hand to her. Then he got back into the car and
drove away. And as Clare went up in the lift again she asked herself
remorsefully how she could be so happy when Pat was still missing.

Marilyn was in bed when she came in. But as there was a light on in her
room, Clare went in, to find her younger child reading, though she looked
oddly rumpled and unquiet somehow.

“Oh, Mother, how glowing you look! Was it a nice evening?”

“Lovely. Except for one upsetting thing.” And she proceeded to tell
Marilyn about the girl with the bracelet, which made her daughter open her
eyes wide.

“If you’re sure it was really Pat’s, I suppose she must have sold it. Which
means she must be—” Marilyn cleared her throat—“temporarily hard up.”

“Why temporarily?” enquired Clare impatiently. “If she refuses to come

home she’ll remain hard up. Unless she is counting on getting some sort of
job.”
 “Which she must be,” Marilyn pointed out practically. “How else could
she manage?”

“I don’t know,” said Clare with a sigh. “I don’t pretend to understand at

all what is behind this mystery.”

“Don’t worry, Mother,” Marilyn advised her soothingly. “I’m certain

everything is going to work out all right quite soon. You say that otherwise
the evening was a success? Did Dad enjoy it too?”

“I think he must have,” Clare smiled. “At least he suggested we should

repeat it.”

“Did he? Oh, that’s wonderful!” Marilyn sat right up in bed. “It’s all
working out splen—”

“What’s working out?” Her mother looked both amused and curious.

“Oh, well—” Again Marilyn cleared her throat and looked slightly self-
conscious. “I was just thinking, while I was here alone, that it was almost a
good thing Pat went off in this queer way. Provided nothing’s really the
matter, of course,” she added virtuously. “But at least it brought Dad home,
didn’t it? And that gave you two a chance to—well, to get together again
and find some common ground. You’re looking so happy, Mother, in spite
of the anxiety about Pat.”
 “I know.” Clare gave a quick, remorseful sigh. “I keep on asking myself
if I have any right to feel so happy when there’s still this mystery about the
child.”

“Don’t reproach yourself about that,” cried Marilyn eagerly. “You just go
right on being happy. There’s no need to worry about Pat. She’s all—I
mean I’m sure she’s all right, and the best thing you can do for all of us is
to make the most of having Dad here in London. You never know what
might happen from this—this enforced meeting.

“Don’t raise your hopes too high, Mari.” Her mother smiled at her
affectionately. “Nothing is ever just black and white. There are a lot of
shades of grey in this particular problem.”

“But you enjoyed yourselves together. You said you did! And if things
went on developing from there you’d be glad, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you,
Mother? Tell the truth.”

“Oh, Mari! How do I know?” Then, as she saw the dismay and
disappointment in her daughter’s face, Clare added hastily, “All right. I’d
be desperately glad if there were some way back to the happiness of those
early days. But I don’t know if one can ever find quite such a long road
back. Or if he would want it,” she whispered half to herself.

“Of course he would! Oh, Mother, everything’s going to be all right. I’m
sure it is! I can feel it in my bones.”
 And so joyously confident was Marilyn’s tone that her mother laughed
before she kissed her good-night and went to her own room.

It was not entirely easy to produce yet another excuse for slipping off the
next morning, but Marilyn was becoming good at ingenious implications
and suggestions; and after an anxious minute or two she got away all right
without actually having to invent a specific story.

Her spirits were as high as they had ever been, and the alarm occasioned
by the policeman’s visit the previous evening had almost completely
evaporated. There was simply no question in her mind now about the
certainty of her finding a message waiting at the garage. Pat had said she
would leave one, and later events had made it imperative that she should do
so as soon as possible.

Consequently it was a cheerful and smiling Marilyn who presented

herself once more at the garage, and she waited confidently until her friend
of the previous day should be free.

Evidently he remembered her, for he grinned immediately and said, “Still

looking for the Chipperfield Hotel?”

“No.” Marilyn grinned back at him in a friendly way. “But I think my

sister left a message with you for me?”

He looked surprised and shook his head.

 “No message left for you here, my dear.”

“N-no message?” Marilyn was shaken and appalled. “But there must be
one. Perhaps a written one? Perhaps there’s a note for me in the office. One
of the other attendants might have taken it?”

“I’ll go and ask for you. When was it left?” the man wanted to know.

“Some time yesterday. In the afternoon or evening, I should think.”

“She didn’t leave any message when she first came making enquiries in
the morning,” the man asserted positively.

“No, no, I don’t mean then. She wouldn’t have worked out what to do at
the point. She was too much taken aback at finding no hotel there. You said
she just got back into her taxi and drove away.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But later. She must have come back later. She phoned a friend of mine
and said she’d leave a message here for me about her plans. It—it would be
rather urgent.”

“I’ll go and enquire.” The man went away into the small office, and
Marilyn saw him through the window talking to a girl at a desk, and
another man who was lounging against the wall. But presently he came out
again and said there had been no message left the previous day, either
verbally or in writing.

“I can’t understand it!” All Marilyn’s smiling confidence had drained

away from her, leaving her puzzled and scared again. “It’s just possible that
she left it until today, I suppose. Though I’d have thought—” She broke off.
Then, aware that the man was looking at her curiously, she made an effort
to seem cheerfully normal. “Well, she might come along any time now. I’ll
wait about a bit. I might go and have a coffee at that place over there.”

“That’s right. You do.” A customer who evidently thought the world was
run for him began to honk his horn impatiently and, losing interest in
Marilyn, the man turned away.

Slowly she made her way to the small cafe across the road, and there she
ordered a coffee and sat at a table in the window, watching the garage
opposite and longing, as she had never longed for anything in her life
before, to see the familiar figure of her sister coming along the street.

“Why didn’t she leave a message at the first opportunity? Either yesterday
or early today? She had absolutely nothing else to do, and it must have
seemed to her of the utmost urgency,” thought Marilyn, trying to resist the
panic which threatened to swamp her. “She must have been hoping against
hope that I’d come early rather than late. Why on earth should she delay?
Unless of course—” irresistibly the possibility forced its way into
Marilyn’s mind—“unless of course, she was stopped in some way.”
 The moment the idea had formed in words Marilyn felt quite sick with
dismay. She nervously pushed away the cup of weak coffee, which seemed
to her now even more nauseating than it really was. And she thought of the
policeman last night saying that Pat’s handbag, rifled of any contents of
value, had been found on the river towpath.

“I must have been mad not to tell Mother—or Dad—at the first possible
moment!” She was overwhelmed with remorse for her fatuous
complacency. “I should have known something must have been terribly
wrong. Why, for all I knew, someone might have snatched her bag and then
just pushed her—”

But, as the frightened tears gathered, she forced them back with the
reassuring reflection that no one who has pushed someone else into the
river then lingers to examine the contents of a handbag—still less leaves
the bag on the scene for easy identification. No, wherever Pat had been
when her bag was lost or stolen it had not been by the river.

Then why, why was there no news of her?

“She’s just—vanished!” Marilyn told herself in unspeakable dismay. “No

word from her. No sign of her existence. Except—”

And then, as a fresh wave of chill engulfed her, Marilyn suddenly

remembered the incident of the girl her mother had described wearing Pat’s
bracelet.
 How had she come by that bracelet?

When Marilyn first heard the story from her mother she had smugly
taken it as no more than confirmation of her theory that Pat had sold what
she could in order to bridge a difficult twenty-four hours. Now, however, in
view of Pat’s genuine disappearance, the incident became suddenly sinister
and terrifying. So terrifying that, for the very first time, Marilyn began to
understand, with personal, poignant intensity, the anguish which she and
Pat had inflicted on their parents.

“It wasn’t really a good plan, after all,” she thought remorsefully.
“However good the cause, we shouldn’t have done that to anyone. We
should have found some other way of getting them together. Mother must
have gone through agonies before that first letter came. She must have felt
as I’m feeling now! Oh, Pat, why don’t you come? Why didn’t you leave a
message?”

She bent her head to conceal her distress from anyone at the
neighbouring tables, and a few tears fell into the coffee, making it even
weaker and less appetising. It was no good pretending to herself any
longer. She was utterly at a loss, and quite unable to think what she could
do next. And, like the smallest child, all she wanted to do was to run to her
parents and unload her desperate troubles on to their more capable
shoulders.

“If I told Mother now—”

 But then she recalled her mother’s happy look when she had come in the
previous evening, and she flinched from the very thought of transforming
that expression into one of fresh horror and anxiety.

“She’s had enough,” Marilyn muttered unhappily. “I don’t think she could
take any more.” And then, after a long pause—“That leaves Dad.”

It was not going to be easy, owning up to her father. Most of Marilyn’s

cheerful self-assurance wilted at the very thought. On the other hand, if Pat
were in some real danger or difficulty, her father, rather than her mother,
might be the right person to deal with it.

One thing was quite certain, she herself could no longer tackle the
situation alone. And, having come to that unpalatable conclusion, she got
up, paid for her undrunk coffee and slowly left the place.

Just once more she went to speak to her friend at the garage, to make
absolutely certain that no message had come in by telephone while she had
been sitting in the cafe. Then she said with some resolution,

“If my sister does come, will you tell her to telephone home without fail?
Tell her—it’s all right. Nothing matters but that she should phone home.”

“All right.” The man looked at her curiously. Then he added, “I wonder
just what you’re up to. You’re a funny kid, I must say!”
 Marilyn grinned feebly at him as she turned away. But she didn’t feel a
funny kid at all. She felt about seventy-five and quite unfunny.
 CHAPTER VII

ALL the way to the Gloria Hotel, Marilyn was trying to decide how she
was going to tell her story to her father. At first she even flattered herself
that she might get away with only a partial confession. But irresistibly the
conviction grew upon her that the moment had come to make a clean breast
of things. Pat had genuinely disappeared, and all help must be mobilised.

“He’ll be terribly mad with us both, of course,” she reflected resignedly,

as she entered the great foyer of the Gloria. “But if he thinks Pat is in real
danger he’ll probably put that before every other consideration.”

Even so, she was trembling slightly and her voice was nervously sharp
and uneven as she enquired at the desk for Mr. Collamore.

The desk clerk peered at a row of pigeonholes, clinked a key in one of

them and replied, “He’s out.”

“Out?” Somehow, Marilyn had not thought of that possibility. She needed
him so badly that it seemed to her he surely must be there. “You—you
don’t know when he might return?”

“No. I’m sorry. Would you like to leave a message?”

 “No, thank you.” She shook her head. No message was going to put him
in the picture. Only a long, painful talk, involving a full confession, would
suffice now.

As she turned away, lost in dismay and confusion, a good-looking, well-

dressed woman came up to her and said with a smile,

“I heard you asking for Greg Collamore. You must be his daughter. I
don’t think he’ll be long. Why don’t you come and sit over here with me
and wait for him?”

The self-reliant Marilyn was usually quick in her reactions and seldom
did she need anyone to tell her what to do. But at this moment she felt
stunned and bewildered. She was almost glad to have some course of action
—any course of action—suggested to her, and wordlessly she did what she
was told. Then, even before she could collect herself sufficiently to ask who
the stranger was, the woman said, pleasantly enough, “I know your father
very well.” A sort of nervous awareness of danger suddenly prickled all
over Marilyn. “My name is Mrs. Curtiss—Linda Curtiss. I met your sister
when she was in Munich, and I feel sure you are Marilyn.”

“Yes,” Marilyn spoke warily, “I am. Pat told me about you. What makes
you think my father will be back soon?”

“He told me he wouldn’t be long.” Mrs. Curtiss spoke with an air of

having an intimate knowledge of his movements. “I’m staying at the Gloria
too, you know. We see a good deal of each other.”

Marilyn, who had a certain talent for saying nothing rather offensively,
said nothing at that moment and just stared thoughtfully at the other
woman.

Then, after a few moments, she said, “Oh?” And it was quite remarkable
how much scepticism, scorn and private amusement she managed to
express in that one syllable.

Linda Curtiss, who prided herself on her ability to handle people and
situations, actually flushed, and her genuinely beautiful violet eyes
narrowed slightly. In her turn she allowed a slight silence to supervene.
Then she said drily,

“Although you’re the younger, I should think you’re the ringleader in any
mischief you two get into, aren’t you?”

“We’re a little past the ‘mischief’ stage,” replied Marilyn coolly. “But
we’re both pretty determined about what we want and how we’re going to
get it.”

“And sometimes what you want is to make trouble?” suggested Mrs.

Curtiss, taking out a slender but handsome gold cigarette case. “Do you
smoke?”
 “No, thank you. And I don’t think my mother would describe either of us
as trouble-makers.”

“But then she might be something of a troublemaker herself, I suppose?

And if you were all in it together, you’d naturally back each other up.”

“What on earth do you mean by that?” Marilyn was stung into sharp
anger.

“Oh, really, my dear!” Linda Curtiss laughed slightly as she selected a

cigarette from her case and lit it. “Do you suppose I haven’t guessed what
you two and your mother are up to? Some sort of clumsy plot to try to lure
poor Greg back home. This absurd business about your sister disappearing!
It couldn’t be more obvious to another woman. Only a man would be taken
in by it. You all banked on Greg’s natural good nature, I suppose, and that
vague sense of parental guilt which he has. You thought you’d frighten him
back into the family fold by the disappearance of Pat, and then your mother
could get her hooks on him again. Too silly and naive!”

“How dare you use such an expression of Mother! And she had nothing
whatever to do with it.”

“To do with what?” came the quick response, and Marilyn caught her
breath. But she recovered immediately and said coldly,
 “There was no sort of plot, as you put it. You’re just trying to make
mischief!”

“No, my dear. I’m simply an amused spectator. I told your father from the
beginning that this business of your sister’s disappearance was a put-up
job.”

“My sister is really missing,” said Marilyn stonily, unhappily aware that
this was now nothing less than the truth.

Mrs. Curtiss smiled with infuriating disbelief.

“And now your mother has sent you to stir up Greg’s anxieties afresh?”
she suggested. “It’s really very clumsy, you know. I shall tell him so. It’s
too bad that he should be victimised by you three.”

“My mother has not sent me here. I came of my own accord.”

“For what purpose?” the older woman shrugged. Marilyn opened her lips
to say with angry desperation that she had come for her father’s help
because Pat really had disappeared. But then, with gathering dismay, she
saw that the story she had come to tell would merely provide fresh
ammunition for this clever, ill-wishing woman. With a sceptical laugh, she
would describe the frightening development as just a fresh move in a
clumsy game—and she would make Marilyn’s father see it that way too.
With her clever gift for insinuation, Mrs. Curtiss would have little difficulty
in extending the real guilt of the two girls to embrace their entirely innocent
mother too.

“I would be handing her the victory on a silver plate!” thought Marilyn in

a terrified flash of comprehension. And, with a speed and skill born of
sheer desperation, she retreated from the position which had so suddenly
become a trap.

“What I do, or why I do it, is no business of yours,” she said drily, getting
to her feet. “I didn’t really mean to be offensive until you started it. But you
may as well know that Pat told me about the way you chased poor old Dad,
and she was a good deal amused to see him taking evasive action. But
frankly, I’d only find it a bore. After all, it is rather old hat, isn’t it? So I
won’t wait any longer. I’ll talk to him on my own some time later. Good
hunting! But not, I think, in our family field.”

And with her head high, Marilyn marched out of the lounge and out of
the Gloria Hotel.

Her mood of angry elation lasted until she found herself on the pavement.
But then a perfect wave of frustration and misery engulfed her. She might
have won a verbal battle with Linda Curtiss. But so far as practical help for
Pat was concerned, she was as far from her goal as ever. It looked as
though she would have to tell her mother, after all, and heap fresh anxieties
upon her. For there was no one else with whom she could even discuss the
position. Unless—Suddenly a faint gleam of hope showed on the horizon
and, with a warmth of feeling amounting almost to affection in that
moment, she recalled the existence of Jerry Penrose. He knew all about the
real situation and would require only the minimum of explanation. Also he
had Pat’s interests very much at heart. And, most blessed thought of all, he
was both resourceful and sensible.

She must find him immediately, Marilyn decided. And, by standing quite
still on the pavement—to the annoyance of an old gentleman just behind
her—and concentrating fiercely, she remembered the name of the firm for
which he worked.

“Morgan & Petersfield!” she exclaimed aloud in her relief. And, rushing
to the nearest telephone booth, she riffled through the pages of the directory
until she found the address.

Then, since it was already perilously near what might well be his
lunchtime, she allowed herself a taxi to the City, found her way to the top
of the big block of offices which her mother had described, and presented
herself at the same enquiry desk before which Clare had trembled in almost
equal agitation only a few days before.

“I want to see Mr. Jeremy Penrose, please,” she exclaimed breathlessly.

But, before the girl at the desk could even reply, the swing doors into the
main office opened, and out came Jeremy Penrose.

He stopped dead and said, “Hello! What are you doing here?”
 “Jerry!” She greeted him with the warmth and fervour of a long-lost and
dearly-loved relation. “I’m so glad to see you. I had to come. Pat’s
disappeared!”

“Well, I know.” He looked slightly wary, as one who had gone through
this curious experience before. “What’s new about that?”

“But she’s really disappeared this time. Don’t you see? It’s not pretence
any longer. It’s the real thing. I haven’t the faintest idea where she is, and
something’s terribly wrong.”

The reality of the crisis was so unspeakably plain to her that she could
hardly forgive him for the way he hesitated and the sceptical glance with
which he surveyed her.

“Look, Marilyn—” he began. But then he stopped. Because, without

much effort this time, she had made her eyes fill with tears, and she was
looking at him as though he were her last hope. Which indeed, in a sense,
he was.

“All right,” he said curtly. “You’d better come with me and have some
lunch.” And he grimly ushered Marilyn towards the lift once more, hoping
that the interested blonde at the enquiry desk would not have the story half-
way round the office by the time he returned.
 “I’m sorry t-to be such a nuisance,” stammered Marilyn humbly in the
lift. “But I couldn’t get Dad to myself. That Curtiss woman was floating
around making mischief. And I just can’t bear to unload all this fresh
anxiety on to Mother alone. She’s had about all she can stand. It—it was
like a light in the darkness when I remembered you.”

Few young men are proof against the flattering thought of being a light in
the darkness to an attractive girl, and Jerry Penrose softened visibly.

“So long as you’re not just playing everyone up again,” he said, but more
kindly.

“No, I’m not! It’s all the truth this time, I promise you. Something quite
unforeseen has happened, and I’m frightened.”

“Very well. You shall tell me all about it, and I’ll see what can be done,”
he told her, in a marvellously reassuring tone. “We’ll go in here. It’s near
and will save time.”

In the crowded, rather steamy help-yourself just opposite his office block
they were lucky enough to find a small table to themselves. And here, over
a meal for which she had little appetite, Marilyn rapidly outlined the story
of the last twenty-four hours.

He listened in almost complete silence to the end. And then, with

considerable authority, he said, “My dear girl, there’s only one possible
course. You simply must tell both your parents everything, and get the
police on to the business of finding Pat. We’ve all played the fool quite
long enough.”

In some obscure way, she was faintly comforted by his use of “we”
instead of “you”. But she was still so much under the influence of her
conversation with Mrs. Curtiss that she exclaimed anxiously,

“If that woman has half a chance to give him her interpretation of things,
Dad will be bound to suspect that Mother too was in the original plot.”

“Not if you make your confession to both your parents at the same time.
Your father will see perfectly well from your mother’s reactions that she
didn’t know a thing about it.”

“Ye-es, that’s true.” Marilyn blanched slightly at the thought of taking on

both her mother’s reproaches and her father’s anger at one and the same
time. But her fears for Pat were now so acute that she was prepared to face
almost any ordeal. “H-how can I make sure of getting them together,
though?”

“I think I’d better phone your father first.” Jerry seemed to have taken
command quite naturally. “He should be back at the Gloria by now. I’ll tell
him I have news about Pat for him and Mrs. Collamore, and that you and I
would like to tell them together. Can he arrange to be at the flat in half an
hour’s time? Then I’ll just check that your mother is there.”
 “D-did you say—you were coming too?” Marilyn’s lips were suddenly
trembling.

“Yes, of course. You’d find it tough on your own, wouldn’t you?”

She nodded wordlessly.

“And it will sound more convincing if I take part in the story too,” he
added.

“Thank you.” Marilyn’s voice was husky. “You needn’t tell them the bit
about your finding out the truth early on and not telling them. They might
blame you for that.”

“They probably will,” he agreed drily. “And quite right too. But we’re
telling them the whole thing this time, Mari. And if a bit of the blame is
transferred from you to me I guess I can take that all right.”

“You’re—you’re rather a dear, really.” Marilyn gulped slightly. “I’ll be

sure to—to tell Pat, when we find her.”

Then the poignancy of that last phrase struck on her heart and she bent
her head to hide her tears.

“All right—don’t cry about it,” he said, a trifle roughly. “I’ll go and
phone now. You sit there and get your courage up. And you might start
thinking out some telling phrases for when we have to put the story as well
as we can.”

He went away to the callbox at the back of the restaurant, and Marilyn,
anxious and forlorn though she still felt—and dreading the scene which was
to come—somehow gathered a certain degree of comfort from the sheer
fact that Jerry Penrose felt he knew her well enough to be almost rude to
her.

Apparently he had better luck than she had had over the matter of getting
the right people together. He was back again in a short time, with the
information that both Marilyn’s parents would be waiting for them at the
flat in half an hour.

“Were they scared when you said it was about Pat and that we wanted to
see them together?” Marilyn enquired.

“He was. He thought it was bad news and that I felt your mother would
need his support when it was given.”

“You reassured him, I hope?”

“Partially.” Jerry Penrose’s usually kind eyes looked rather hard.

“Why only partially?” Marilyn was suddenly indignant on her father’s

behalf.
 “He was the one who walked out on his responsibilities, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, but it wasn’t as simple as that!” Marilyn was nearly as shocked as

her mother would have been. “Mother says—”

“All right. Come along. At least I was much more careful with her. I told
her simply that there was an interesting development and I’d like to come
along and tell her about it. I didn’t even mention that your father would be
coming. I didn’t want to frighten her.”

“It doesn’t seem quite fair,” began Marilyn.

“We won’t start handing out the bouquets and the brickbats yet,” he
interrupted. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, of course! We’d better take a taxi, hadn’t we?”

“No. We’re taking a bus.”

“The taxi’s on me, if you’re hard up,” Marilyn assured him. “You’re
doing this for my family, after all.”

“I’m not hard up,” Jerry Penrose said. “At least, no more so than usual.
But we don’t want to arrive too early. It’s vital that your father should get
there first and realise that we couldn’t possibly have had a useful chat with
your mother before he came.”
 “That’s true.” Marilyn shot him an admiring glance, and followed him
meekly to the bus stop.

But both her patience and her nerves were sorely tried on that long bus
ride. When she thought of the ordeal in front of her she would have liked
the journey to last for ever. But when she thought of the terrifying mystery
of Pat’s genuine disappearance she was wild with impatience to set some
sort of enquiry in motion.

“How can we tell if Dad’s arrived or not?” she asked timidly as they
approached the familiar block.

“He’ll be there,” replied Jerry, with the cool confidence of one whose
arrangements usually worked. Then he added a trifle ruthlessly, “I
frightened him just enough for that. Which was the idea.”

As they went up in the lift together he took her hand unselfconsciously

and gave it an encouraging squeeze.

“In half an hour the worst will be over,” he reminded her, and she
managed to respond with a faint smile.

It was her father who opened the door before she could even put her key
in the lock, thus settling any doubt about his being there first. He looked
drawn and somehow older than Marilyn had ever supposed him to be, and
he said in a rapid undertone to Jerry Penrose.
 “If it’s really bad news, tell her gently. She’s had about all she can stand.”

“It’s not what you mean by really bad news,” Jerry replied categorically.
“It’s puzzling and requires a good deal of explanation first. Then we’ll have
to do some hard thinking about action instead of just waiting for something
to happen.”

Gregory Collamore looked faintly reassured, though puzzled too at the

authoritative way this young man seemed to have taken over the direction
of events. And Marilyn noticed that, when they all went into the sitting-
room together, her father sat down on the settee beside her mother, as
though he had been there before their arrival and still felt she might need
the support of his presence.

“Jerry, how kind of you!” Clare held out her hand to him and smiled
anxiously. “This must mean you’ve been trying to help us again.”

“Not as much as I should, Mrs. Collamore,” he replied frankly. “There’s a

long story to tell, and we may as well say right away that it begins with
Marilyn having to confess that Pat and she originally engineered Pat’s
disappearance.”

Marilyn, who had not quite expected to be flung in at the deep end like
this, gasped at the ruthlessness of Jerry’s tactics. But she instantly
recognised their irresistible force as well, for there was simply no doubting
the genuineness of her mother’s astounded horror and anger as she cried:
 “Mari! You—and Pat? Oh, you couldn’t have done anything so wicked!
Why should you?—Why?” Wordlessly, Marilyn stood before her parents,
shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, the picture of guilt and
remorse.

“I don’t understand!” Clare pushed back her hair with both her hands.
“What have I or your father ever done that you should inflict such misery
on us? Don’t you know what you made us suffer? The torture of that first
evening—that useless journey—oh, everything! I can’t believe it of you!”
And she actually buried her face in her hands, as though to shut out the
sight of her guilty daughter, while Greg put a comforting hand on her
shoulder and looked sternly at Marilyn.

“Why did you do it?” he said helplessly. “Didn’t you care about hurting
your mother—or me?”

“It—it wasn’t that we wanted to hurt you.” Marilyn spoke through dry
lips. “It was just—” She made a futile sort of gesture with her hands. “We
wanted you to come home—” she said with forlorn simplicity. And then
she began to cry—desperately, hopelessly, without even putting up her
hands to her face.

“You wanted—?” Her mother raised her head and stared at her.

“You wanted—” it was her father who spoke through dry lips now—“you
wanted me as much as that?”
 Marilyn nodded, and her harsh, almost childish sobs seemed to tear little
rents in the silence of the room.

Jerry Penrose moved as though to go to her, but Gregory Collamore

stopped him with a swift gesture, and he himself went to his daughter and
took her in his arms.

“Don’t,” he said at last. “Don’t cry like that, child.” And he put his cheek
down against the top of her head. “It was a terrible—a ridiculous thing to
do. But I think I understand.”

“Greg!” Clare spoke half in astonishment and half in protest. But he

looked across at her over Marilyn’s head and said,

“It was just as you insisted to me. We failed them.”

“No, you mustn’t blame yourselves too much.” Marilyn looked up then
and spoke between gulps. “We were wrong, Pat and I. I see that now.” Then
she looked at her mother’s pale, distressed face and with a little cry of
remorse she ran to her and, kneeling beside her, flung her arms round her.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” she said. And once again she seemed unable to get
further than the bald, simple statement.

“All right.” Bewilderedly, Clare ran a singularly gentle hand over her
child’s dishevelled hair. Then she looked at Jerry Penrose and asked, “Do
you think you could finish the story?”

“If Marilyn prefers it that way.”

“Yes, please.” Marilyn’s face was half hidden against her mother and her
voice was muffled.

So, lucidly and concealing nothing, Jerry went over the story from the
moment of Pat’s disappearance until she telephoned to him at his office, at
which point Clare interrupted reproachfully.

“You mean you realised then that the whole thing was a hoax?”

“Yes,” said Jerry resolutely.

“But you should have told us! Don’t you think it was unpardonable for
you yourself to join in the deception?”

“Yes, I do,” he admitted frankly. “But I’m afraid I indulged in some

muddled thinking at that point. I was reluctant to interfere too insistently in
another family’s affairs. Though I think I was wrong now.”

“I persuaded him,” Marilyn interrupted doggedly. “Both Pat and I played

on his kindness and good nature. It was our fault.”

“Oh, Mari!” exclaimed her mother. While her father said grimly,
 “Don’t you think you’d better finish the tale yourself, young woman?
Otherwise we’re going to put some of the blame in the wrong place.”

“Yes.” Marilyn, who had recovered some of her natural courage and
resolution by now, flashed Jerry a grateful smile for all his support and
then, in a husky voice, took up the story. When she came to the visit of the
policeman the previous evening, her father exclaimed almost violently,

“Wasn’t that enough to make you confide in us?”

“I still thought it was only a temporary crisis,” Marilyn explained timidly.

“I knew she’d be short of money, of course, after losing her bag. But it
seemed to me she’d get by all right for twenty-four hours if she pawned her
watch or her bracelet or something—”

“Her bracelet!” interrupted Clare, glancing at her husband, who nodded

shortly.

“It wasn’t until I got to the garage this morning and found there was no
message—no sign at all from Pat—that I realised something must be
terribly wrong.”

“But you were there rather early in the day, weren’t you, Mari? She might
not have got there until later,” suggested Clare, clinging to the only faint
hope which offered.
 But Marilyn shook her head despondently.

“She’d have got there at the first possible moment, Mother. She had to.
Why should she delay? She’d already managed to let me know there would
be a message there, and her need to contact me had become even more
urgent than before.”

“Perhaps she hadn’t the money for a bus fare,” Clare said desperately.
“Perhaps she had to walk quite a long distance.”

“What’s the name of the garage, Marilyn?” her father asked abruptly.

She told him, and added the telephone number when she saw him move
towards the phone. Then they all watched silently while he called the
garage and asked if there were any message for the young lady who had
made enquiries that morning.

From his expression they knew the answer even before he put down the
receiver and said grimly, “Nothing.”

“That girl—who had her bracelet—” Again Clare looked at her husband.

“Yes, I was thinking of that.” Greg fished in his pockets and brought out
an envelope with a number scribbled on the back. “At least I have the
number of the car. If I go along to the police now—”
 “Ah, that’s better!” exclaimed Jerry, who had been a silent spectator of
the family scene for some minutes now. “Let’s have some action. We’ve
none of us had our priorities right in the last few days. The one thing that
matters now is to find Pat.”

“Of course!” Clare smiled at him gratefully, almost as though he were a

member of the family. But Greg, who of course had never seen him before
in his life, seemed to think the young man a trifle officious.

“It’s very good of you to have taken so much interest—so much trouble,”
he said stiffly. “And we owe you a debt for bringing Marilyn to her senses
and making her come and tell us the truth. But now that—”

“That’s all right, sir,” interrupted Jerry, firmly but kindly. “I’m in this too,
if you don’t mind. I’ve got Marilyn’s interests warmly at heart.”

“Pat’s,” corrected Marilyn, in the interests of accuracy.

But he looked at her and grinned.

“Marilyn’s,” he repeated. “Allow me to know my own mind. I think

you’re a tiresome little idiot, and you probably deserve a good spanking for
the way you’ve behaved to your parents. But you called me into this
business yourself, and I’m going to see you out of your present troubles
whatever anyone says.”
 “Are you?” Marilyn stared at him, wide-eyed, as though she really saw
him for the first time.

And in all the fog of misery and anxiety and guilt which enveloped her
there was suddenly a bright shaft of light, just because Jerry Penrose had
said she was a tiresome little idiot but he had her interests warmly at heart.
 CHAPTER VIII

HOWEVER comforting Jerry Penrose’s intervention might be to Marilyn,

for Clare and her husband it provided no special lifting of the heart. All
they could think of was the urgent necessity of starting once more on the
weary, agonising search for the now genuinely lost Pat.

“Shall I come with you to the police, Greg?” Clare got up and came to
her husband’s side, as though sensing that his need of her was as great as
her need of him. “I might know some fact or remember some detail that
escaped you.”

“If you feel you can bear it,” he said bleakly.

“Of course I can bear it! Much better than sitting here waiting for news,
to tell the truth. Let’s go together, dear.”

She slipped her arm into his, and for a moment he brushed his lips across
her cheek, as though unspeakably thankful to have her there.

“Will you trust me to stay here and look after Marilyn?” asked Jerry at
that point.
 “I doubt if she needs anyone to look after her,” replied Greg drily. “She
seems to have shown herself well able to take the initiative—for good or ill
—without the support of anyone else.”

“I’d like Jerry to stay,” Marilyn said humbly. “It would be better than
waiting here alone.”

Jerry looked disproportionately pleased at this modest estimate of his

company, and Clare said, “Please stay, then, Jerry. I expect the police will
want to see Mari later. But perhaps it’s best for my husband and me to
make the first approach.”

“Yes, indeed!” And as Marilyn looked startled and anxious, Jerry moved
to her side with the obvious intention of putting fresh courage into her.

“It’s still half make-believe to those two young idiots,” Greg observed
grimly as he and Clare went to the lift. But Clare said,

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. It’s just that, having confessed their disgraceful
part in this, they’re almost weak with relief, and they can’t help feeling
things will somehow be all right now.”

“Having unloaded their anxiety and trouble on to us, you mean?”

“Isn’t that what parents are for?” Clare smiled faintly. And after a
moment he made a slight face and said,
 “Yes, I suppose they are. How much do we tell the police?”

“Everything.” Clare was resolute about that.

“Even the girls’ so-called reason for doing this preposterous thing?”

“How else can we make the situation clear? They were so unhappy about
the break-up of their family life that they thought they must do something.
That’s the sole reason for Pat’s disappearance in the first instance.”

She saw from his expression that he very much disliked the idea of laying
their private affairs before a stranger. But he accepted her commonsense
ruling. And when they arrived at the police station, it was he who took on
the disagreeable task of telling their story to the stolid-looking sergeant,
who sat at a desk taking notes.

“So you mean, sir, that in your opinion the young lady disappeared
intentionally in the beginning, but that now she would like to come back
but can’t.”

“I know it sounds an improbable story, but—”

“No, sir. Nothing is improbable these days,” the sergeant said resignedly.
“You couldn’t tell me anything about young people that would surprise me.
What makes you think she wants to come home now but can’t?”
 “She has practically no money—” Clare began. “That’s usually the least
of their worries. If they’ve got a bit of push they can get a job almost
anywhere. If this young lady really intended to leave home—”

“But she didn’t! Not really. It was a—a sort of hoax,” Clare pointed out.
“Then it became vital for her to contact her sister. She arranged to do so—
and then there was nothing from her. Not a word or sign.”

“She could have changed her mind.”

“There was no reason for her to change her mind.”

“Oh well—” the sergeant’s tone said clearly that in his experience people
constantly changed their minds for little or no reason at all.

“Then her bag was found—rifled.”

“She might have disposed of it herself.”

“With her passport in?”

“No,” the sergeant conceded. “No, that’s unusual.” And he made another
note. “Now what’s this about her bracelet being worn by another girl? You
say there’s no possibility of its being a duplicate?”
 “Hardly the smallest chance.” Clare spoke quickly, before Greg could. “I
had it made to a special design for her.” And, slowly and clearly, she
repeated the story Greg had already told.

“You say you have the number of the car these people drove off in?” The
sergeant turned to Greg. “Yes. Here it is.”

The sergeant noted down the number. Then he studied what he had
written and said,

“Well, we’ll make the routine enquiries for a missing person, and we’ll
try to trace the owner of this car and make enquiries there too. Meanwhile,
if the young lady turns up—” he seemed to regard this as a distinct
possibility—“perhaps you’d let me know immediately.”

“Yes, of course.” Greg spoke a little stiffly. And then, with Clare’s
imploring eyes on him, he added, “Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“You’ve enquired at the homes of her various friends, I take it? Anywhere
where she might be staying.”

“There’s nowhere she would go and not be able to come back,” Clare
insisted.

“Assuming she really has changed her mind and still doesn’t want to stay
away. We’re not really sure about that, are we?”
 “Everything points to it!”

“Well, no, madam, I wouldn’t say that exactly. The only thing we know
positively—according to her sister’s admission—is that she went away of
her own accord in the beginning. It’s possible that the situation has
changed, and of course we’ll follow up that possibility. That’s all I can say.”

It seemed that was all anyone could say. And on the short drive home
Clare and Greg hardly addressed a word to each other. Then finally she
burst out,

“He wasn’t very helpful, was he?”

“I suppose he thought the chances were that it was just another crazy,
inconsiderate kid playing up her over-anxious parents.” Greg’s mouth was
set grimly. “It could be, too, of course,” he added after a moment.

“It’s not! I know my child—At least, I think I do.” Clare pressed the back
of her hand against her forehead. “She was happy at home. There was
never any real reason for her to go away, as I always thought. It was just
this mad idea she and Marilyn had. And now that things have gone wrong
for her—as shown by the empty handbag and the bracelet on another girl’s
arm—she would want only one thing—to get in touch with Mari. She knew
how to do so. She’d suggested the very way herself. And yet there’s this
utter silence. No one can tell me she isn’t in trouble—or danger.”
 Greg made no answer to that, but it was obvious from his expression that
his thoughts jumped with hers. And by the time they got back to the flat
they both looked so dispirited that Marilyn cried anxiously, “No news? N-
nothing helpful from the police?”

“Nothing.” Clare ran her hand distractedly through her hair. “Oh, they’ll
make what they call the routine enquiries for a missing person. But the
sergeant was obviously more than half convinced that she’s still staying
away of her own accord. It’s so difficult to explain an individual person to
someone else. He just thinks she’s any sort of tiresome teenager kicking
over the traces. He doesn’t know she wouldn’t do this or she would do that
just because she’s Pat. He doesn’t know how Pat ticks. How should he?”

“Give him a little time, Mrs. Collamore,” Jerry said encouragingly. “They
never promise anything. They can’t. But they’re much quicker on the
uptake than many people think. And they have very efficient machinery for
tracing people, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I keep telling myself that, and thank you for reminding
me.” She smiled faintly. And then, as she saw him taking prolonged leave
of Marilyn, “Must you go now?”

“I’m afraid I must. I didn’t leave word at the office that I’d be missing all
the afternoon, and I’d better put in some sort of appearance, however
belated.”
 “Yes, of course. We can’t thank you enough for all your help and
support.” And she followed him out into the hall.

For a whole minute there was silence between Marilyn and her father.
Then, as they heard Clare go to her own room, he said, as though with
some difficulty,

“Mari, when you were really frightened this morning, why did you go to
that young man—a virtual stranger—for help? He’s a nice fellow, I admit,
but wouldn’t it have been more natural to go to your mother—or to me?”

“I didn’t feel Mother could stand any more. She’s so alone and—”

“All right,” he interrupted quickly, as though something stung him

unbearably. “I understand that. But why didn’t you come to me? Did you
think of me as so unfatherly and uncaring?”

“No, no!” She was moved by the bitter unhappiness in his face. “I did go
to you. I went to the hotel. But you weren’t there. You were out.” And then,
after a pause, “Mrs. Curtiss was there.”

“Linda Curtiss?” Her father glanced at her sharply. “Surely you didn’t
talk to her about it?”

“She talked to me.” Marilyn looked down at her tightly clasped hands.
“She said she knew Pat and I and Mother were all in some absurd sort of
conspiracy to—to get you back. She—” Marilyn swallowed—“spoke
abominably about Mother, and said she would make it quite clear to you
that you were being fooled by us all.—What did you say?”

“Nothing!” Gregory Collamore got up and walked restlessly about the

room. “Go on with your story.”

“I defended Mother, of course. But I think I let slip the fact that Pat and I
had been in some silly sort of conspiracy. And then I saw that if I owned up
to you at this point, Mrs. Curtiss would easily persuade you that Mother
was involved too.”

“She would never have persuaded me of such a thing!” He spoke

violently. “I know your mother far too well. She’s the soul of integrity. No
one could have made me think she would do anything small or petty or
undignified like that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Marilyn said diffidently. “Perhaps it was silly of me

not to realise how well you knew and appreciated Mother. But Mrs. Curtiss
was very—confident, and seemed to think she could influence you a lot. I
was too frightened to take any risks. I could only think of getting away
before I betrayed myself further. So I said something rude—”

“Thank God for that!” exclaimed her father unexpectedly.

 “—and got away,” finished Marilyn. “But then I realised that I was still
without any help for Pat. And suddenly—” she smiled wanly but as though
she still savoured that moment of relief—“I remembered Jerry, and I knew
he’d help me.”

“You were more confident of him than of me?” said her father bitterly.

“Yes, I was,” replied Marilyn simply.

“But why, child? Why?”

“He’s easier to understand.”

“Easier—?” Greg Collamore caught his breath on a gasp. “Why should he

be? I’m your father! You’ve known me all your life, while this young man
—”

“Knowing someone all your life doesn’t make you understand them.”
Marilyn drew a sigh. “I don’t understand anything about you in the last
year. You say you love Pat and me, but you were content to go away and
leave us. You speak of Mother as though she’s the most wonderful woman,
but you wouldn’t have come near her if Pat hadn’t disappeared. You say
you’re glad I was rude to Mrs. Curtiss, but you could have snubbed her
yourself any day—only you didn’t. I don’t understand any of that. What I
understand about Jerry is that he’s simple and straightforward and says
what he means. He told me I’d been a fool, which I knew. But that didn’t
prevent his liking me and feeling he must help me when I was in trouble.
That’s quite simple to understand and—Oh, I’m sorry!”

She paused in utter dismay, for her charming, self-assured, elegant father
had dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Dad—” She approached him timidly, but he made a slight, though

unmistakable gesture of dismissal. Then she heard a sound which made her
turn and flee from the room.

“Mother—” she burst into her mother’s room, to find Clare sitting by the
window, aimlessly staring out.

“What is it?” At Marilyn’s sudden eruption into the room, Clare turned a
white, anxious face upon her.

“It’s—Dad. Please go and talk to him. I—I think I said some things I
shouldn’t, and he’s upset. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d say he was
crying—”

“Greg!” Clare brushed past her dismayed child and went out of the room.
At the sitting-room door, she hesitated a second. Then she went in. His face
was no longer hidden. Indeed, his hands hung slackly between his knees as
though they were useless and no longer the clever hands of which both he
and she had once been proud. He was staring in front of him—as aimlessly
as she had looked from her window only two minutes ago—and he looked
bleak and bewildered and much older than he really was.

“Greg dear—” she went to him and knelt down beside him. “What is it,
darling?” She didn’t want to tell him Marilyn had sent her. “What is it? You
look as though you’d heard or seen something horrible.”

“I have.” His voice sounded a little rough and hoarse. “I’ve seen myself
—in the mirror that my own child held up to me.” And he gave an unhappy
little laugh that tore at her heart-strings.

“Don’t talk like that!” She put her arms round him, and he rested his head
against her as though it ached. “We’re worried, and unstrung, and
remorseful—both of us. But you mustn’t look so despairing. Once we’ve
found Pat—”

“And if we don’t find her it’s my fault,” he said, though he gratefully

returned one or two of the soft kisses she gave him.

“No, darling. Stop tormenting yourself and taking all the blame. It’s not
logical nor sensible.”

“I don’t feel logical or sensible,” he said, but he began to look less

strained.

“We’ve both been stupid and wrong—”

 “You haven’t,” he protested almost indignantly. “You’ve been an angel.”

“I’ve been nothing of the sort!” She actually laughed. “I’ve been a silly,
inflexible, resentful woman, clinging to my dignity and nursing my small
grievances until they grew out of all proportion. I’m not taking all the
blame, Greg, but I won’t have you take it either. The sad, sad, stupid thing
is that it’s taken us nearly a year to speak to each other like this.”

“I know. And for long enough before that we’d—lost the way, somehow,
and neither would take the other by the hand and try to find the way back.
Was it pride, Clare, or resentment, or sheer stupidity—or what?”

“Something of all those, I expect,” she said slowly. “And the inability to
say what was really in our hearts, instead of the bitter, wounding things that
lay so easily ready to our tongues.”

“Saying the things we didn’t really mean,” he murmured half to himself.

“She said—Mari said—she understood that young man because he was
simple and straightforward and said what he really meant. She said she
didn’t mind his telling her she had been a fool, because she knew it was
true and yet it made no difference to the fact that he liked her and would
help her when she was in trouble. He liked her. She didn’t claim that he
loved her. He liked her—and apparently that was sufficient to show him
what was important and unimportant where she was concerned.”
 “It’s not so easy when you love someone,” Clare told him tenderly.
“Liking is such a much easier relationship than loving. That’s why one
must try so much harder when one loves, I suppose. There’s so much to
gain—and so much to lose.”

“We didn’t try hard enough, my darling, did we?” He put up his hand and
almost diffidently smoothed her hair.

“Not after we first lost the way.”

“But we could—at least—Clare!” He turned to face her and there was no

assurance in his manner, only the eager pleading there had been there the
first time he told her that he loved her. “Clare—” he laced his fingers in
hers like a boy—“do you think we could try again?”

“If you—want to enough.”

“I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life before,” he

said. “That’s the simple, straightforward truth. And it wasn’t a bit difficult
to say!” She laughed a little unsteadily, and he kissed her on her trembling
mouth.

“I love you,” he told her, earnestly and categorically. “I love you! How
could I ever let anything else blot out that all-important fact?”
 “Probably I didn’t make it sufficiently clear that I loved you too and that
nothing else was important in comparison,” she told him with a smile. “But
it doesn’t matter now. We need never bother about apportioning the blame
again. We’ve found each other. Greg, we’ve found each other! And now all
we need is to find darling Pat too.”

“We’ll find her all right,” he asserted. And confidence and resolution
flowed back into him like a tide, so that she thought,

“This is the man I loved and married! This is my husband and the father
of the girls, and the centre of all our lives.”

“We shall hear something soon, I’m sure we shall,” he declared, as

though he thought she still needed comforting. And, like the answer to his
certainty, there was a ring at the bell which brought them both to their feet.

Marilyn reached the front door before they could cross the room, and a
moment later she came in, a little hesitantly.

“It’s the police sergeant,” she began, unnecessarily, as that gentleman had
already followed her into the room. Then she stopped, her lips parted and
her eyes wide as she registered the intangible but overwhelming change
which had taken place in her parents since she last saw them.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Greg Collamore spoke eagerly.

 “We’ve traced the car owner, sir. And I’d like you and Mrs. Collamore to
come along and see if you can identify him as the man you saw in the
restaurant. He runs a pawnbroker’s shop in a rather tatty part of Chelsea,
which does seem to suggest a possible connection.”

“We’ll both come, of course!” Clare exclaimed.

“And I’m coming too,” stated Marilyn determinedly.

The sergeant looked as though a family party had not been in his scheme
of things. But Marilyn said pleadingly,

“I’ll wait in the car. I won’t interfere. I’ll do whatever you say. Only I
can’t just sit here wondering and wondering what is happening.”

“She can come in the car with us,” her father said. “Do we give you a lift
too, or have you got a police car?”

“I have a car, sir. You follow on after me, and when we get to the end of
the street, I’ll point out the shop to Mrs. Collamore and get her to look in
the window, or even go inside and enquire about something, so as she can
see if there’s anyone there she recognises.”

“Why can’t I do that?” Greg asked quickly.

 “You’ve already had words with him, you say. He’ll recognise you,
whereas it’s unlikely that he’ll recognise your wife.”

“Yes, I see.” Greg gave way reluctantly, and they all went downstairs to
the street.

Marilyn would have got into the back of her parents’ car, but her father
said, “Why don’t you come in front with us, Mari? There’s room.”

So she slipped in gratefully and sat between them. And when her father
patted her tightly clasped hands she knew suddenly that she was forgiven
for anything she had said and that, somehow, something wonderful and
inexplicable had happened.

Marilyn stole a sidelong glance at her mother and thought, “How pretty
she is!” Then she looked ahead and thought, “How bright the sunshine is
for some reason!”

In places the traffic was thick, but Greg followed the police car
meticulously, and when it came to a stop he drew up a few yards behind,
and the sergeant came to the open window to speak to Clare.

“Ten shops down on the other side, Mrs. Collamore, just beyond the
dairy. Look in and see if you recognise anyone there. If there’s no one in
sight, go in and ask the price of something in the window. Then come back
to me. I’ll handle the questioning about the bracelet.”
 She got out of the car and carried out his instructions exactly, while
Marilyn and her father sat side by side watching her. She seemed to take
her time about examining things in the shop window. Then, without even
bothering to go inside, she came back to them and reported,

“They’re both there. Both the man and the girl who wore Pat’s bracelet.
They look terribly—ordinary and harmless, in those surroundings, I must
say.”

“They probably are, Mrs. Collamore,” the sergeant said drily. “We’re not
looking for any sinister implications, you know. We just want to know how
those people came by that bracelet. You and your husband had better both
come along with me, so that you can identify it.”

It was all too obvious that this invitation did not include Marilyn. So
reluctantly she stayed where she was, envying her parents as she saw them
disappear into the shop, in the wake of the police sergeant.

“They’re silly not to take me too,” she thought rebelliously. “I know

much more about Pat and her probable movements than anyone else. They
might miss something vital that I’d spot in a minute. They mightn’t see the
significance of it. Whereas I—”

She was out of the car before she had completed the arguments to herself,
and quickly walked the hundred yards to the shop. Only a matter of
minutes covered the time between the entrance of the first group and the
moment when, with a “ting” from the door-bell, Marilyn stepped boldly
into the shop, for all the world as though she had merely come in to buy
something.

“I’ve never seen this gentleman in my life, and I don’t know what you’re
talking about,” was the flustered assertion the girl was making, while the
man stood there, backed by an incongruous bunch of dusty bulrushes in a
jar, looking glum and sullen.

“You’ve seen us both,” Clare pleaded, though the sergeant obviously

wished she would leave the talking to him. “Don’t you remember—at the
Cordova the other night? You were there, weren’t you?”

“And suppose we were, what’s that to you?” the man interrupted angrily.
“People can eat where they like, I suppose? What’s all this in aid of,
anyway?”

“I’ll tell you what it’s in aid of.” Suddenly Marilyn came forward and
spoke directly to the girl. “And you needn’t be frightened or apologetic. I
expect you’ve just done something a bit silly that’s difficult to explain.
You’re not the only one. My sister and I did something silly, and that’s
what’s caused all the trouble. You see, my parents separated—”

“Marilyn, there’s no need to go into all that!” Her father sounded angry,
while the sergeant looked as though he would have liked to pop her into
Holloway. But she went steadily on,
 “There is need to tell her, then she’ll understand why we want her help
and not to get her into any trouble.” Then she turned back to the girl. “Pat
—that’s my sister—and I hit on the idea of her disappearing, and we hoped
that the anxiety would bring my parents together again. Which it did,” she
added rather wonderingly.

“If you don’t mind, miss—” interrupted the sergeant.

“Yes, I do mind! I’ve told only half my story, and it’s important this lady
should understand.”

The “lady” whose gaze was fixed on Marilyn in a sort of wary

fascination, relaxed indefinably at this form of approach, and Marilyn went
on,

“Everything was going splendidly, when it looks as though my sister’s

handbag was stolen—”

“I stole no handbag!” exclaimed the girl, while the man said angrily,

“If you’re making any accusations and taking people’s character away—”

“You shut up and stop being silly,” Marilyn told him without looking at
him. “And no one suggests for a moment that you stole her handbag, you
silly girl. But because her handbag was stolen she had to raise some money
on something. And I guess she came here trying to sell or pawn her
bracelet.”

“That’s right,” the girl said unexpectedly. “She wouldn’t sell it. She said
she wanted it back because it was a present from her mother, but she
wanted some money just the same. So, though we don’t usually do business
that way, with someone we don’t know, we let her have a couple of pounds
on the bracelet.”

Clare caught her breath on an audible gasp.

“But you liked the bracelet, didn’t you?” Marilyn said kindly. “It was so
pretty and unusual, and you were going out that night, and there wasn’t any
reason why you shouldn’t borrow it.”

“Except that goods in pawn aren’t supposed to be taken off the premises,”
interjected the police sergeant.

“Oh, don’t be silly!” Marilyn admonished the representative of the law.

“What does it matter? Maybe it wasn’t exactly right of her, but it wasn’t a
crime either.”

“Within the meaning of the law—” began the sergeant.

“This isn’t the meaning of the law. It’s my sister’s bracelet,” retorted
Marilyn crushingly. “Anyway, you borrowed it, didn’t you, even though
you knew you shouldn’t. And then you were dead scared when someone
pretty well rose out of the ground and queried just that bracelet?”

“It didn’t seem natural like,” the girl murmured. “Out of all London that
someone should come up and ask about it.”

“That sort of coincidence only happens in real life,” Marilyn assured her
sagely. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Where is the bracelet now?”

There was an obvious struggle in the mind of the girl. She looked sullenly
from the waiting police sergeant and the anxious Clare and Greg back to
the eager face of the girl who was questioning her. Then she said, as though
the words were forced from her, “I’ve got it at home.”

“You mean you intended to keep it?” the police sergeant said sharply.

There was silence.

“But what were you going to say when my sister came back to claim it?”
Even Marilyn sounded slightly shocked.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” The words suddenly came tumbling out.
“I wasn’t going to have to say anything. Because I was pretty sure she
wasn’t ever coming back.”
 CHAPTER IX

MARILYN stared in unspeakable dismay at the girl who stood sullenly

behind the crowded counter.

“You guessed my sister wasn’t ever coming back, you say?” She tried
vainly to check the chill that engulfed her. “But how could you? What
makes you say that?”

For a moment the girl looked as though she were slightly dazed at finding
she had admitted so much. Then the police sergeant spoke abruptly.

“Come along now. What did you mean by that? Those are queer words to
use. What have you been up to?”

“I haven’t been up to anything.” She looked scared suddenly. “I didn’t do

anything to her.”

“But you just said—”

“Don’t badger her!” Once more Marilyn tried the sergeant’s patience
sorely. But he let her have her way as she turned back to the girl and said
pleadingly, “Tell me—please tell me. I love my sister and I feel dreadful at
being partly responsible for bringing her into trouble. Tell me what
happened. Help me, please! Why did you think she wouldn’t come back?”

“There was a street accident,” the girl began reluctantly. Then once more
the words came tumbling out, as though, once she had begun to speak, she
could keep nothing back. “She went out of here with the two pounds in her
hand, and almost immediately I heard car-brakes screaming. The way they
do when someone’s avoiding an accident, or not avoiding it. I went to the
door and there was a crowd round a car at the crossing over there, and in a
minute there was an ambulance. And when the people moved aside I saw
there was a red beret in the road. She’d been wearing a red beret.”

“Oh—Pat,” said Clare in an agonised whisper, and she groped for her
husband’s hand and held it.

“Then someone slammed the ambulance door,” the girl went on, “and it
drove away, and the crowd dispersed. I asked someone who came past what
had happened, and he said it was a young girl who was knocked down. And
I—I guessed she wouldn’t come back for her bracelet.”

“But she might have when she recovered,” cried the optimistic Marilyn.

“No.” The girl hesitated again and then said flatly, “The man said she was
a goner.”

“A—a goner?” repeated Marilyn. “You mean she was—”

 She couldn’t finish the sentence. But the small moan from her mother did
that for her.

“It was kind of mean to take the bracelet,” the girl conceded. “And
unlucky, I guess. But I wanted it,” she added, as though that constituted a
reason for her conduct, though perhaps not a very good one.

“Wait a minute—wait a minute—” Suddenly the police sergeant’s voice

broke in, subtly comforting in its matter-of-fact tones. “Your informant
wasn’t quite right about that, young woman.” He studied a page of his
notebook. “There’s been no fatal accident reported in this district in the past
week. That young lady’s still alive, in one of the local hospitals, and she’ll
be coming for that bracelet one of these days. You’d better fetch it back,
and be more careful of other people’s property in future. You nearly put
yourself on the wrong side of the law that time.”

“Oh, never mind the bracelet!” cried Clare. “It’s Pat that matters. Pat—ill
in hospital and alone. Where is she most likely to be? We must go there
now. Oh, Greg—” she turned to her husband—“it—it—”

“Yes, it looks like the end of the search,” he agreed, putting a strong,
loving arm round her. “Keep up your spirits, darling. She may not even be
very badly hurt.”

“The man said—” began the girl offendedly. But no one was listening to
her. They crowded out of the shop, even the sergeant infected by a certain
degree of excitement by now, and piled into the two cars.

“She may have given her name as Miss Foster,” Marilyn remembered to
say. “That was the name she used while—while—” Her voice tailed off as
the sergeant’s glance rested on her.

“While you two were playing the fool, you mean, miss,” he suggested
grimly.

“Yes,” agreed Marilyn, with quite unwonted humility. But her morale was
indescribably restored when she glanced contritely at her father and
received in return the very faintest suggestion of a wink.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and pressed hard against his arm as she
slipped into her seat once more between him and her mother.

At the first hospital enquiries for both Miss Collamore and Miss Foster
yielded no result at all. But at the second one the sergeant who, as the one
in authority, had undertaken the enquiries, came back to the waiting family
and said,

“I think we’ve got her this time. They have a young girl in recovery unit
not yet identified. Regained consciousness only this morning and either
couldn’t or wouldn’t answer questions. No handbag and nothing on her to
establish identity.”
 “That’s Pat!” they cried in relieved chorus. And Clare added anxiously,
“Is she badly hurt?”

“Fractured skull, but she’s now off the danger list,” replied the sergeant,
with such beautiful brevity and exactness that Clare very nearly embraced
him.

After a short telephone conversation between the clerk at the enquiry

desk and the sister of the ward concerned, the family were told they could
go and see the unidentified patient.

“I’ll wait here, sir,” the sergeant told Greg. “But perhaps you’d slip down
and let me know if we’ve got the right young lady, then I’ll get back to the
office and get on with some other things. We can tie up any odd ends later.”

“Yes, indeed!” Greg looked for a moment as though he thought perhaps

he should apologise in some way for his two daughters and the trouble they
had caused. But the sergeant had already turned away, his attention
obviously reaching ahead to another of his manifold and various duties. So
Greg said nothing, but just hurried after Clare and Marilyn into the waiting
lift.

They all looked a trifle strained and anxious by the time they had
traversed a long, polished corridor and reached a door which bore the
admonition, in big letters, “Silence. No Admittance.” But, even as they
paused, a nurse came out of a nearby room and said, “Are you Mr. and Mrs.
Collamore?”

They nodded, Marilyn nodding too, although apparently she didn’t count.
Then the nurse opened the door and they stepped into a high, quiet,
clinically white room.

And there, lying very still in her hospital bed, was Pat.

“Darling—” Clare went forward, her hands out to touch, though very
gently, the child who had seemed so completely out of reach for so cruelly
long.

There was a slight flutter of the heavy eyelids. Then Pat opened her eyes,
gazed with incredulous joy at her mother, looked beyond her at her
breathlessly waiting father, and seemed quite unable to control the two big
tears which then rolled down her cheeks.

“It’s all right, sweetheart.” Clare kissed her fondly and took one of the
slack hands in hers. “Don’t worry about anything now. Everything’s going
to be all right.”

“I expect she’d like to have it a bit more specific than that, Mother,”
declared Marilyn, coming forward. And, standing beside her sister’s bed,
speaking astringently if affectionately, she stated categorically,
 “We shouldn’t have done what we did, Pat, but it’s all explained and
forgiven now. And anyway, it worked. At least—” her confidence suddenly
wavered and she glanced back at her father.

“It worked,” he agreed gravely.

“Well, there you are, you see!” Smiling, Marilyn turned back to her sister.
“It worked. Mother and Dad have come together again, and now you only
have to get well. And we’ll even be able to get your bracelet back, so don’t
cry any more.”

Whatever cloud still dimmed Pat’s immediate powers of grasping a

complicated situation, it was obvious that her sister’s forthright speech had
dispelled most of her worries. A tremulous smile flitted across her face and,
with a sort of feeble eagerness, she held out her free hand to her father.

“Darling child—” He came forward and, taking the hand, put it

affectionately against his cheek. “Everything’s all right. We’re together
again.”

“The whole family,” stated Marilyn, with a gusty sigh of satisfaction, “is
together again.”

“We’re sorry—for the trouble—and anxiety,” whispered Pat.

 “We’re all sorry for one thing or another, dear,” her father said, bending
down to kiss her. “But tomorrow is another day, and maybe we’re all a little
wiser than we were.”

“I’m afraid she’s had enough excitement for the moment.” The nurse,
who had been a distant but interested spectator of all this, rustled forward
now. “Perhaps her mother might stay with her for a while. But, if you don’t
mind, I’m going to turn you other two out now.”

Marilyn and her father looked meekly ready to be turned out.

“I’ll see the sergeant and then wait downstairs for you,” Greg told his
wife. “Don’t hurry things.”

“I might be quite a while,” she warned him.

“Do you think I mind how long I wait for you now?” he said softly, and
they exchanged the kind of glance which made the years roll back to the
lovely loving days when they had understood each other’s every look and
word.

“I’ll wait too,” Marilyn declared. Then a thoughtful expression came into
her eyes, as though a good idea had presented itself. “Or maybe—I’ll do
something else.”
 No one pressed her to be more specific. So she and her father kissed Pat
and took their leave, and on the long walk back to the reception desk and
the waiting sergeant, Marilyn said diffidently,

“I didn’t bounce you and Mother into a final reconciliation, did I? I mean,
you hadn’t actually said anything to me about it. But I did think, from the
way you both looked—”

“Some things don’t need putting into words, Mari.”

“To the person most concerned they do,” Marilyn asserted quickly. “To
Mother, for instance. I don’t think you should leave her in the slightest
doubt that—”

“I have not left her in the slightest doubt.” Her father’s smile was dry but
not unkindly. “The family reconciliation is complete.”

“O-oh,” said Marilyn. And slowly the delicious realisation began to dawn
upon her that perhaps her parents could manage their own affaire without
any intervention from her.

The sergeant offered brief but sincere congratulations on the news that
Pat had been found, and even smiled a trifle sourly when Marilyn added
generously, “Thanks to you, really, of course.”

“Well, miss, you insisted on taking a hand too, didn’t you?” he observed.
 “Only to quicken things up, as you might say,” Marilyn insisted.

“Just so,” agreed the sergeant. And then, after a word or two more with
Greg, he went away. At which point Marilyn dived into her handbag, came
up with what seemed to be a rather unsatisfactory result and observed,

“I’d like to make a phone call, but I haven’t any change.”

Her father obligingly remedied this situation, and Marilyn hurried to a

call-box, dialled rapidly, listened to the chink of coins falling and gasped
with relief and satisfaction when an extremely indifferent voice said,
“Morgan & Petersfield.”

“Is Mr. Penrose still there, please?”

“It’s after hours,” was the unpromising reply. “Most people have gone
home and—”

“Yes, I know. But he’s probably working late. He was out most of the
afternoon and had some work to finish. Will you enquire, please?”

Grudging enquiries were evidently made. Then Jerry’s voice—deep and

strangely satisfying to the ear—said, “Yes? Penrose here.”

“Jerry! It’s Marilyn. We’ve found her! She’s in hospital after a street
accident.—No, not very seriously hurt, but she was knocked out, and when
she came round this morning she either couldn’t or wouldn’t give any
account of herself. Everything’s all right, though. Mother’s with her now,
and Dad’s waiting at the hospital for Mother. They’ve made it up. I guess
they’ll go out afterwards and have a quiet celebration together.”

“And you?” enquired Jerry’s voice. “Where are you? And what are you
going to do with your evening?”

“I’m at the hospital too. But I shan’t stay on. I reckon Mother and Dad
ought to have this evening to themselves. I—hadn’t thought of doing
anything special. I’ll just go home, I expect.”

“You’d better come out with me. I’m a bit low in funds, after the
holidays, until my end-of-the-month cheque comes in, but I can stand us a
coffee-bar sort of meal, and it’s a nice evening for a walk through the
Park.”

“I could pay my own share,” Marilyn offered. But he said,

“No, that isn’t necessary. I’ll get on the blower to my mother and tell her
I’ll be late. Meet me in half an hour’s time under the clock at Charing Cross
Station.”

“I’ll be there!” she cried joyously. And then, as unmistakable sounds

indicated that she had had her money’s worth and the line had gone dead,
she replaced the receiver and rushed back to her father.
 “Is it all right? I’m going out with Jerry Penrose this evening.”

“Since when did you ask my permission to go out on any evening?”

enquired her father. But he looked as though he were oddly flattered by the
query.

“You haven’t been there to ask,” Marilyn reminded him a trifle pertly.
“But if you’re going to be around in the future, I might ask you
sometimes.” And suddenly she dropped a cheeky but affectionate kiss upon
his cheek.

“Yes, ask me sometimes.” He returned her kiss with a smile. “I’d like
that. It makes me feel like a real parent again. With Jerry Penrose, you say?
Yes, that will be all right. But don’t be late. I expect your mother will be
jumpy about both you girls for some while. She’s going to need a lot of—of
tenderness and consideration from all of us.”

“Yes, I know. I won’t be late,” Marilyn promised virtuously. And, with a

daughterly—almost protective—pat on her father’s shoulder, she smiled
and left him to wait for the lost love he had rediscovered.

With an incredibly lightened heart she went out into the early evening
sunshine. It was still the rush-hour, and she had to wait for a bus and then
stand for most of the journey. But the smile that hovered happily round her
lips suggested there was no easier nor more delightful form of travel.
 She was so happy that she could have embraced everyone. Her father was
restored to the family circle. Her mother looked happier than she had for
years. And Pat had been found. No wonder the world seemed a wonderful
place!

But, over and above all that, a lovely, indefinable sense of radiant well-
being permeated every bit of her. She could not have given a name to it.
She thought perhaps it was just the sense of infinite relief after so much
anxiety and distress. But whatever it was, it carried her on golden wings
through the crowded rush-hour and right into the gloomy cavern of Charing
Cross Station.

She stood there for a moment, half confused by the crowds of people
hurrying for their trains. And then she saw Jerry, waiting there for her, and
suddenly she knew why it was that she was happy, happy, happy beyond
expression.

“Jerry—” she ran to him with outstretched hands—“Jerry, I’m here!”

He caught her hands in his and for a moment they just stood smiling at
each other without a word. They were unaware of the crowds that were
milling round them, for a timeless, golden vacuum enclosed them in
glorious isolation.

Most of the people who passed were too busy or worried or absorbed to
notice them either. But just one or two of them glanced at those radiant
young faces and smiled. And as they went on their way it seemed to them
too that perhaps the world was not such a bad place, after all.