Doctor Ramsay had volunteered to join the line of men in the second search at the Tide Mills. Half the village had taken part in the first one, but for this one they wanted only men. When she heard this, Kathleen had passed out. She had guessed it was because they expected to find her body. She had urged the Chief Inspector not to bother. Alice never went there, Kathleen had told her it was too dangerous. Then Steve had pulled her up off the floor and together with the detective helped her on to the settee:
‘Let them get on with their job.’
‘I was only putting them right.’
‘They don’t need putting right.’
‘She never went there.’
‘Yes, she did.’ Steve was steely and brutal.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She went there last Saturday with that Eleanor Ramsay.’
‘But she was last seen on Tuesday afternoon in the lane near the Ramsays’ house.’ Kathleen robotically spoke in a newspaper phrase.
‘So, it means she knew about the place.’ He had kept close to her, perhaps already concerned that the police should guess how disturbed she was. Maybe he thought they would try less hard to find Alice if they thought her mother was unbalanced. Or was it that he worried that seeing this, the police might blame Kathleen, as Steve already blamed her, for their daughter’s vanishing?
‘She went the day after you first took her to meet those Ramsays.’
‘Alice would have told me.’
‘She told me.’
‘She what? Did you tell her off?’ Kathleen had hoped that Steve was nice to her. Her anguish for every harsh word either of them had ever said to Alice, however mild, was still unbearable now, decades later.
His face had gone strange, twisted, tight. He wasn’t Steve.
‘I was never cross with her.’
‘On the last day, she promised me to behave.’ She could only repeat: ‘They played hide and seek by the White House. Chief Inspector Hall told us that Eleanor said…’
‘Like I said, let them get on with it.’
That was when Kathleen had learnt that Alice had been closer to Steve than she was to her. For the first time since Alice was born, Kathleen had minded about the strong unspoken love they shared. Only in life is the heart a bottomless pit. Alice’s love was now finite and Kathleen wanted more than half her share of it.
With the doctor dead, Kathleen assumed she would get no more tapes. So she had lost another chance of finding Alice. He had delivered them to her every Saturday on his way to Lewes when he would also collect last week’s batch. She had the tapes ready by the door in a plastic bag. He never came in and they always went through the same routine:
‘Here’s another week’s worth. You keeping well?’
‘Can’t complain. I’ve put these back in date order and rewound them. How are you?’
‘Tired and I do complain, but no one listens!’
‘You must treat yourself properly.’ Kathleen didn’t like to delay him, he was still a busy man. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you next week then.’ She never liked to presume.
‘Same time same place!’
Doctor Ramsay never asked if she had found anything on the tapes. He was too sensitive. He trusted her to tell him. Whatever she said he would believe her.
She knew this for a fact.
The tapes recorded all the comings and goings at the White House. Initially Kathleen had ignored anything that was outside the remit of her search. She was poised, intent, because this might be the week when Alice would materialise: a sneaking image skipping past the pool, dodging out of sight of the windows, cutting across the garden on her way back home.
But Kathleen had observed that the Ramsays had a lot of visitors. She could not help becoming familiar with the man who came to see Isabel for several months on Wednesday afternoons when Kathleen knew the doctor was in London. But she didn’t notice the day he stopped appearing on the film. Kathleen tried to forget most of what she saw because she respected the Ramsays’ privacy; she was looking for Alice, everything else that went on was irrelevant. Yet despite herself, Kathleen got to know all the routines of the house. The video counter recorded the times of arrival of those who delivered: groceries, chemicals for the pool, furniture and of course the post. In the early tapes Kathleen would see the figure of Steve going up and returning down the drive, the film making him look like a character in the Woodentops. Then Kathleen would have to wind back and look more closely. This was a Steve she had never known, after he left the house in the mornings. In the past she hadn’t needed to know this other Steve for she had her own one. But as she watched the blurred black and white figure jerk across the screen over and over again, she felt miserable in a new way to the constant ache of Alice. This out-of-focus monochrome image was all she had. When Steve died the figure changed. First there was a relief postman, an elderly man, who would pause on the path to smell the lavender and here and there to dead head a flower, and then the permanent replacement – a woman young enough to be Kathleen’s daughter, who didn’t look in the least like Alice.
Kathleen had begun by taking notes, partly to help her concentration, but as her Parkinson’s got worse, her writing became harder to read, and it was harder to write. So she gave up and kept no notes on her thoughts about the woman who she saw lingering behind the Judge’s shed every Friday morning when Doctor Ramsay was out and which, Kathleen also knew, was the gardener’s day off. She didn’t mention her for a long time because the woman always had her back to the camera and, besides, the film quality was very poor. Kathleen didn’t want to risk her relationship with Doctor Ramsay by bothering him with stupid fancies until she was absolutely sure.
Last Saturday Doctor Ramsay hadn’t appeared. Kathleen waited in, confident that he would come. He was so reliable. She hadn’t liked to ring, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. The tapes were a big favour. Perhaps after what she had told him he had decided to stop letting her see them. Perhaps he had decided to use the same tape, erasing the previous week’s worth. Kathleen had tried not to panic. She relied on the tapes.
Kathleen had not believed Iris when she told her, and she had wanted to get out of the shop. She wished she had not gone there, perhaps if she had stayed at home, she could have prevented his death. But she had gone for precisely that reason, worried as the time went on and Doctor Ramsay did not come. If there was anything to know, she had known that Iris would know it. As she struggled back and pushed open the front door, which these days she used all the time, she had caught her foot on the bag of videos still by the hat stand in the hall. Now Kathleen would have to find a way of returning them that wasn’t rude.
Doctor Ramsay’s death made Kathleen think again about Alice. If he could die, with his big smile and his sparkly eyes, perhaps Alice could die too. She wouldn’t believe village rumours that the doctor had killed himself. He was a doctor; he gave life. She didn’t go out all of the Sunday. But on the Monday morning she remembered what he had said about the flame of hope and when she felt well enough she ventured next door to the stores and bought a sympathy card for Isabel Ramsay. She had planned to send roses too, until Iris informed her they had specifically said no flowers.