Miss Silver inclined her head.
“Was he not seen? Did nobody hear the shot?”
“There was a pneumatic drill working outside. I don’t suppose anyone would have noticed a machine-gun, let alone a couple of revolver shots! The clerk’s description wouldn’t fit more than about two or three hundred thousand people-except for red hair which nobody would go out gunning with unless as a disguise for the occasion. The lad did one rather bright thing though. He was making an entry in red ink at the time the hold-up occurred, and he managed to smear some of the notes they made him hand over. He says he doesn’t think the chap noticed.”
“The clerk will recover?”
“Oh, yes. The other poor chap was shot down in cold blood-he hadn’t a chance. Somebody saw a car drive off and was able to describe it. But of course it was stolen, and got rid of as soon as possible-found abandoned not half a mile away. The bother is there have been too many of these shows, and a tendency to ask what the police are paid for. You may yet see me playing a barrel-organ on the kerb and holding out my cap for coppers. Or I might do a great disappearing act on my own. ‘Well Known Detective Inspector Vanishes. Loss Of Memory Or Murder?’ It would make very good headlines. And then when I turned up again I could sell my life story to the Sunday papers-‘A Blank World. What It Feels Like To Be Lost.’ Quite a tempting prospect.”
Miss Silver smiled.
“My dear Frank, you really do talk very great nonsense.”
He took another sandwich and said,
“I wonder how many of the missing people whose husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and cousins and aunts come clamouring to Scotland Yard are really lost?”
Miss Silver was filling her own cup. She said in a noncommittal tone,
“I suppose there are statistics.”
“I don’t mean that sort of thing. I mean, how many of them cut loose because they have got to the point where they feel they can’t go on any longer? The husband has had one girl friend too many, or got drunk just once too often. The wife has nagged until the man thinks he had better get out before he does her in. The boy or the girl just can’t stand being asked all the time, ‘Where did you go-what did you do-whom did you see?’ The routine of the shop, or the office, or the factory just gets them where they feel they are going to smash things up unless they clear out. Statistics only give you the facts-lost, stolen, or strayed-so many human cattle. They don’t give you the reasons behind the facts.”
Miss Silver gave a gentle meditative cough.
“Loss of memory is too often advanced as an explanation to be a very credible one. That there are such cases, I do not doubt, and they must, I fear, be the cause of a great deal of suffering- the sudden shock of disappearance, the continued strain, the anguish of longing so beautifully expressed by Lord Tennyson in two of his best known xlines-‘Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.’ But it is only too easy an explanation when a missing person has been traced and desires to avoid the social and domestic consequences of a voluntary disappearance.”
Frank laughed.
“Do you remember a case which was in all the papers a few years ago? A young woman disappeared in the neighbourhood of a large garrison town. She had a father, a stepmother, and the usual quota of friends, but no one seems to have bothered. There had been rows with the stepmother, and everyone seems to have taken it for granted that she had just gone and got herself a job somewhere else. Until-” he paused and reached for a sandwich-“until rather over a year later a young soldier in a regiment which had moved to the Midlands up and confessed that he had murdered the girl in a fit of jealousy and buried her body on a sandy common. He mentioned pine trees and gorse bushes. Since the whole of the neighbourhood was fairly littered with sandy commons, pine trees, and gorse, it became necessary to take the murderer down there and ask him to indicate the spot. He walked the police over umpteen miles of pinewood and heath, with refreshing intervals when he stood and watched whilst they dug holes in the landscape, and every time they didn’t find a corpse he just said these places were all so much alike, and led them to another spot. They went on for about a fortnight. And then the girl turned up-very sorry and all that, but she had only just seen about it in the papers. She didn’t know the soldier from Adam. She had got fed up with her stepmother and went and got a job in London, and she’d been married for a year and had a baby of two months old.”
Miss Silver said,
“I remember.” And then, “An aunt of mine used to tell the story of a woman who had a very bad husband. He drank, he beat her, and he went after other women. She had to go out charing to support herself and her children-people had very large families in those days. When the youngest child was two years old she felt that she could not bear it any longer. The man came home one night, and he was drunk. There was no sign of his wife or of the children. He went into the bedroom, and there were the children’s seven straw hats perched on the knobs of the big brass bedstead, and a note to say they had gone to Australia. My aunt said they did very well there. The children never saw their father again, but twenty years after, when he was old and ill, the wife came back and nursed him until he died.”
Frank raised a sarcastic eyebrow.
‘’Incredible!”
“She was a good woman, and she considered it to be her duty.”
He set down his cup, and found her regarding him thoughtfully.
“You are concerned about the case of some missing person, Frank?”
He leaned forward and put a log on the fire, which sent up a shower of sparks.
“Oh, not really.”
Miss Silver smiled.
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
“Well, as a matter of fact there isn’t anything to tell. The girl had an unusual name and a pair of unusual eyes, that’s all.”
She leaned sideways and picked up her knitting. The first few rows of what was to be a cardigan for her niece Ethel Burkett were in a deep and particularly pleasing shade of blue.
“Really, that sounds as if it might be interesting.”
He laughed.
“Not a hope! The name is Thomasina, and the eyes are of a quite extraordinarily bright shade of grey, with black lashes and a dark ring round the iris-very arresting. But as for anything else-”
Miss Silver coughed. “Did you say Thomasina?”
He nodded.
“Unusual-isn’t it?”
Miss Silver’s needles clicked.
“And she wants to trace a girl called Anna?”
Frank Abbott stared.
“And who told you that, ma’am? You know, a few hundred years ago you would have been in very serious danger of being indicted for witchcraft.”
“My dear Frank!”
There was a teasing gleam in his eye.
“There are moments when old Lamb isn’t at all sure about it himself. Officially, of course, he doesn’t believe in witches, but I’ve seen him look as if he expected you to fly out of the window on a broomstick.”
Miss Silver rebuked this flippancy.
“I have the highest possible respect for the Chief Inspector, and I hope that the sentiment is to some extent reciprocated.”
“Oh, he respects you all right. But he gets his back up wondering just how the trick is done. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, and the Chief doesn’t like having his eye deceived. He likes to take things decently and in order, with plenty of time to think everything out a step at a time. When you get there in a flash of lightning he begins to suspect the unlawful arts.”