Missing. Can you help?
Chris recalled the words with mounting anger. Alice could have helped.
Mrs Howland had scoured districts in London, ridden the Circle line in both directions, even struck up conversation with beggars in the streets. The reporter had hinted that her searching was indiscriminate, driven by Mrs Howland’s certainty, ‘call it a mother’s instinct’ that Alice was alive. She would not rest until she found her. It was clear to Chris that the man who had written the story thought Alice Howland was dead and Mrs Howland in need of medical help.
Alice was not dead.
An Evening Argus headline outside the village stores declared ‘Death Crash: Car was Flying’. There were more flowering tubs outside the shop, Chris was hemmed in by flowers, fresh and sweet smelling. She had never seen so much trouble taken in a street before. She crossed the road and went up to the shop window. Now that she was here, she was cowed by what she was about to do and keen to put off arriving. It had been the hardest thing Chris had ever achieved, to smile, to help with tea, and to appear to share in Alice’s supposed triumph in leaving the flat for the first time in at least ten years. It was only later in bed, her body thrilling with inchoate fury at her Mum’s betrayal, that Chris reached her decision. Indeed it was less of a decision than a viciously inspired impulse for revenge.
Now Chris was the one who knew the facts. Now she knew more than Alice. Except that once she was here in the village where Alice had lived, she was overawed by the mundane actuality of the deserted lane, the tidy cottages and of Charbury Stores with its adverts for first day covers and a jaunty poster for the summer fête. Chris pressed her nose to the glass to read the postcards slotted in a plastic holder dangling from a rubber sucker. The items advertised were eclectic and eccentric: a motorised mobility buggy with waterproof shopping basket for £900, hardly used; piano lessons at £10 per half hour; domestic help required for six and a half hours at £40 plus travel expenses; purple bunk beds hardly used.
An elderly woman with a florid complexion emphasised by her sixties-style make-up, tightly clad in a bright blue overall, bustled out of the shop and shut the door behind her making the bell inside jangle discordantly. She stopped in surprise when she saw Chris:
‘Oooh! Did you want something, dear? Post office counter’s shut, but anything else?’
‘No, that is…’
‘Only I’m closing for lunch. Back in an hour, but if you’re quick…’
Chris cast around for something trivial to explain her presence. Whatever she came up with would inconvenience the postmistress who was moving away from the door. All Chris could think of were the bunk beds.
‘I’m fine, thank you. Just looking.’ The cliché fitted her new counterfeit self.
The woman appeared satisfied and muttering words that sounded to Chris like ‘two Russians flats’ vanished around the corner of the building. Chris put her hands to her cheeks. She had so nearly given herself away. One of the articles had said that since Alice Howland had disappeared, the village had been ‘overrun’ by the media and sightseers, many with teddy bears and other stuffed animals, on anniversaries, on Alice’s birthday, when Mr Howland had died; or when another child went missing. So the villagers were less friendly to outsiders, they no longer welcomed them as allies in the search for Alice. They guarded their privacy, and were frustrated by invasions from as far away as America and Australia.
Would Mrs Howland guess her connection to Alice? Chris knew she looked like Alice. She had been proud of this when she was little; with no other family, at least she belonged with her Mum. When she became a teenager the idea had horrified her. Did she too have that grim expression and do that stupid thing with her mouth when she was thinking? Did she roll a sweet wrapper into a tight ball between two praying mantis hands? Chris wanted to break the news to Kathleen in her own time and not have her uncanny resemblance to the missing girl do it for her. Although she was twice the age that Alice had been when she went missing, still Mrs Howland might see her little daughter in her. Chris was the only person who knew Alice’s hair had darkened and was cut into a short bob that didn’t suit her. She was the only person who knew that Alice was smaller than might have been expected, since one of the articles had said she was tall for her age. Chris was the only person who knew what Alice looked like now.
She sensed a holding of breath in the air and glanced up and down the lane. It was lunchtime in the middle of the week, which could explain why there was no one around. Few cars were parked, which added to the timeless impression. An old motor scooter by the kerb was padlocked to a bucket of set concrete. So they did expect some crime here.
Apart from Charbury Stores there were only houses on this stretch of the lane. Chris knew from the map that the road went past the church. It was a village, but she would have expected to see at least one person driving or perhaps walking from the station. Chris began to suspect she was being observed, but all the windows were blank. She thought of Alice behind her lace curtains but the image had no substance. She didn’t know Alice, so she couldn’t imagine her.
Still feigning interest in the cards in the post office window, Chris turned furtively to look at the cottage next door. It was a compact little house on two levels with sash windows, one up, one down, to the right of the front door. There was yet another hanging basket outside the door, but this one was full of dead stuff, pale withered fronds fringing the rim, the chain rusting. In contrast, the privet hedge was trimmed so neatly that individual leaves were not apparent. As this blended in with the one next door, Chris guessed the neighbours had lumped it in with theirs. The cottage was at the end of a terrace of four. Chris remembered from her notes that they had been workers’ houses, part of an estate owned in the nineteenth century by the Ramsay family, and now almost all of them sold off. All the doors were painted green. Chris had read that the Ramsays still owned a large house just outside the village, with about ten acres of the original land. She had also read that the friend Alice had been playing with that afternoon was called Eleanor Ramsay, and was the youngest daughter of the dead professor.
Chris panicked. She didn’t have a number. This might be the wrong house. It might be the one at the other end of the terrace, or it might be none of them. She had trusted her memory, reluctant to write too much down in case Alice caught her. She shut her eyes. The house in the picture had been to the right of the shop.
It was a hot summer’s day in 1968 and Chris was Alice hurrying home from her brilliant game of hide and seek, tired, contented and ready for tea. As she pushed open the warped, wooden gate and tried unsuccessfully to latch it back, she imagined skipping up to the front door, or up the side path to go in through the kitchen as she had read Alice usually did. She could call out: ‘I’m back!’ to her Mum and Dad. Chris had scribbled down that Alice’s Dad had died of a broken heart, which was a bit far-fetched. Chris didn’t know what having a father was like. She doubted Gary would die of a broken heart, or that he even had one. Her mother had said she didn’t know much about him, just as she had hardly known her own father. As if the fact that she had done without a Dad meant that Chris should do so too without complaining. Alice’s deprivations always had to be greater than her daughter’s. When Chris questioned her about the man who had got her pregnant, Alice would shrug her shoulders and explain it away: the sex with different men, drunk at parties, a bathroom floor, a bed piled with coats. What’s in a name? The main thing was she had been happy at the time. So Chris could be happy too. Besides she had been young, it was easy to make mistakes when you were too young to know better.