Part 10 (1/2)

Ronald Malpa.s.s 2 Portland Street Hutton Cranswick He handed the envelope to Ventnor who copied the address into his notebook.

*That's quite a journey, Hutton Cranswick, it's out by Driffield. Quite a well to do little place by all accounts but I have never actually been there; it was Angie who told me it was a well to do wee place.'

Ventnor looked at the postmark and saw the envelope had been posted on the fifteenth of December that year. *Would you mind if I opened this envelope?'

Prebble looked uncomfortable. *Frankly, I would. Can you wait until her ident.i.ty is confirmed? If it is then you can open and read all the letters.'

*That's fair. I'll need something with her DNA or a swab of your DNA.'

*Her hairbrush, how about that? It has some of her hair in the bristles.'

*Ideal,' Ventnor smiled. *Ideal.'

The man and woman sat side by side on the settee looking at the television and as they watched George Hennessey rise and leave the press conference the woman turned to the man and smiled. *You have made quite a splash, darling.'

*We,' the man squeezed her hand gently, *we have made quite a splash. It's international news, apparently.'

*Yes . . . the yellow helicopter hovering over York . . . it's not the police helicopter . . . it must belong to a television news company, taking footage of York and out to Bromyards . . . especially Bromyards. It looks quaint from the air . . . they both do.'

*As you say . . . quaint. But soon it will be time.'

*Yes, darling . . . I know.'

*Gladys,' the man sighed deeply. *It's been six or seven years . . . possibly more, I have lost count.' He dropped the sponge into the red plastic bucket of warm soapy water and turned away from the car he was cleaning. *I'm not really supposed to do this,' he nodded at the car, *water's getting short.'

*I know,' Carmen Pharoah replied in a solemn tone of voice.

*Well, there's no hosepipe ban yet and, as you see, I use a bucket of water, but I need something to do. Even now I still need something to do, I get a bit lost without her . . . but I use the bath water to water the garden, so I am economizing.'

*Good for you.'

*Well let's talk inside . . .'

The interior of Martyn Penta's house was, Carmen Pharoah observed, neat, and clean and tidy. *The maids have just been in,' he explained.

*The maids?'

*A team of cleaning women, young women really, plus one man-maid, help me keep on top of the house. I could not manage it on my own, heavens no.'

Carmen Pharoah smiled. The interior of the house did indeed smell strongly of cleaning liquids and air freshener. *I see.'

*Well, do take a pew.'

Carmen Pharoah settled on to the deeply upholstered and wide leather-bound settee and read affluence in the room, but this was after all Heslington, and Martyn Penta was, after all, an accountant. *You are not working today, Mr Penta?'

*Yes, I am, I'm working at home. I do that usually unless I have clients to interview. I very rarely go into the office these days courtesy of IT and the web. I can do everything in my study upstairs that I can in my office in York. Any doc.u.ments I need can be faxed to me and I can send by fax, but I was in a putting-off-work frame of mind today so I washed the car as an excuse not to go up to my study . . . then I got your phone call about Gladys. So I carried on was.h.i.+ng the car until you arrived . . . and here you are.'

*Yes, sir, here I am.'

*She hated that name.'

*Gladys?'

*Yes, she said it made her sound Edwardian.' Martyn Penta smiled as if recovering a pleasant memory. Carmen Pharoah observed him to be a well-set man in his middle years, clean-shaven and wearing expensive looking casual clothes, even to wash the car. *It made her sound as old as her great aunt after whom she was named, so she said, and did she hate it, but she wouldn't change it out of a sense of loyalty to her parents . . . So what news do you have?'

*We believe she might have been found.'

*Alive!'

*Sadly, no, I do regret to say.'

*Well, it was too much to hope but you do read of such things, someone suddenly losing their memory and is committed to an inst.i.tution, and then banging their head and remembering everything.'

*Stuff of fiction, I'm afraid.'

*Yes, these days of records and files which follow you around, not so easy as it was for the Victorians who could stage their suicide and disappear, and reinvent themselves with a new name in another city . . . usually having emptied the bank account just beforehand.'

*You sound disappointed.'

*That's probably because I am disappointed, disappearing and reinventing myself somewhere else is a fantasy I have long harboured. So, tell me what you have come to tell me.'

Carmen Pharoah told Martyn Penta of the possible inclusion of his late wife's remains among the human remains found at Bromyards. He fell silent and Carmen Pharoah allowed him a few moments of *s.p.a.ce' before she asked what he recalled about his wife's disappearance.

*Like it was yesterday. I was away when she vanished. I was attending a conference on the Isle of Man. She wasn't at home when I returned from the conference but seems to have been missing for about three days, going by the acc.u.mulation of mail in the letterbox. I reported her missing the following day, after phoning all her relatives and all our friends.'

*Did you have any idea where she might have gone?'

*The only place she went to at all were those wretched meetings.'

*The meetings?'

*It was . . . they were the only thing she lived for. I loved my wife, I will cherish her memory, but she was a six-cylinder, supercharged, dyed in the wool alcoholic. She was a dry alcoholic; she hadn't touched a drink for years before she vanished but, as she was fond of saying, once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. She had replaced one addiction with another, ”h.e.l.lo, I am Gladys and I am alcoholic”. ”h.e.l.lo, Gladys” they would all reply. I went to a few meetings with her you see, she became a ”personality” within AA, a guest speaker at the various meetings in this region telling folk how she used to drink two bottles of gin each day . . . which she did . . . up at eight, already drunk by ten a.m., and now she was ”free” and the meeting would applaud her, that's when I stopped going.'

*Oh.'

*Attention seeking and replacing one addiction with another. She had got on top of the booze but became obsessed with AA and had little time for me or our marriage. AA was utterly central to her life and I was on the edge. I also found out that Alcoholics Anonymous has a perverted sense of sn.o.bbery. I mean, if you get up and say you used to drink beer and only beer n.o.body would talk to you, even though it might have cost you your job and marriage just as whisky might have, but they were interested in you if you were into spirits or the cheap wine, and they were in awe of Gladys's two bottle a day habit but she could be knocked off her perch if a three bottles a day person joined the meeting.'

*That's quite illuminating.'

*I had my eyes opened all right . . . but she was never home, it was one group in the mornings, another in the afternoon and another in the evenings. I was not even second fiddle to the AA. I was in her life in name only. But I still miss her dreadfully.'

*I'm sorry. What we really have to do is to confirm her ident.i.ty . . . dental records or a sample of her DNA.'

*Yes . . . she had a climbing accident when she was a young woman; the left side of her face was permanently concave. She was very self-conscious about it; it was then that she started drinking . . . distinct injury to her skull. She was lucky to have survived and luckier still to have escaped serious brain damage.'

*As you say . . . that might be sufficient to confirm her ident.i.ty but what you report about her drink problem might be very significant.'

*You think so?'

*Yes,' Carmen Pharoah stood, *I think so. I really think so.'