They agreed too that the Starbucks which had replaced Polly’s as the only dedicated coffee shop in the village was a poor substitute. Though the Crown and Anchor had all the latest Italian machines to produce the full gamut of Americanos, macchiatos, flat whites and so on, they also agreed that it didn’t feel right going to a pub just for a coffee. And what passed under the name of coffee at the Seaview Café was only instant.
They were both surprised that, as the remorseless tread of coffee culture took over the whole country, no one had taken the initiative to open a new franchise-free individual venue in Fethering. Such businesses seemed to be springing up all along the South Coast. Maybe there was an entrepreneurial opportunity for someone there?
Carole couldn’t believe her good fortune in having found – or it might be more accurate to say ‘stumbled upon’ – Malk Penberthy. She couldn’t wait to tell Jude about her discovery. Unlike Barney Poulton, that incomer whose vaunted omniscience was now totally discredited, the retired journalist really could claim to be ‘the eyes and ears of the village’.
And his memory was startlingly good. The Fethering Observer always came out on a Thursday and Malk could be specific about not only each article he wrote on the Anita Garner mystery but also the date on which it was published. He remembered the name of every person he’d interviewed in connection with the disappearance and had almost total recall of what they had said. Carole could not have found a more perfect and willing witness.
And Malk Penberthy responded to her interest. Perhaps retirement had made him feel marginalized from the world of news-gathering and he was just delighted to have his expertise valued once again. He visibly enjoyed engaging in speculation with her.
But, of course, the one vital question to which he could not provide an answer was: what had happened to Anita Garner?
Meticulously, he went through the various possibilities which had been discussed at the time and since. Some of these conjectures Carole had heard before, but she made notes of the ones she hadn’t. Anita’s parents, Malk said, had been little help, no less confused than anyone else. The mother had been the more approachable. Mr Garner, a staunchly old-fashioned Catholic, had clearly been obsessed by his daughter and objected strongly to any suggestions of impropriety in her behaviour. Which had made interviewing him a frustrating process.
‘If he had discovered that she had been up to something he would have disapproved of,’ asked Carole eagerly, ‘how do you think he would have reacted?’
Malk Penberthy smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh, Carole, Carole, we’ve all been there in our conjectures. I considered that scenario. Worshipped daughter admits to having had sex before marriage – or something worse – and obsessed father, in a fit of righteous anger, destroys the malefactor to keep her image unsullied. The Fethering version of an “honour killing”. Is that the direction in which your thoughts might have been tending?’
‘Maybe,’ Carole admitted diffidently.
‘A nice dramatic solution, I agree, that would work well as the climax of some shoddy television drama. But not one that can withstand scrutiny. At the time of his daughter’s disappearance, Mr Garner had been in hospital in Clincham, being treated for prostate cancer. He’d been there two weeks and didn’t come home until a couple of days after the last sighting of Anita.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. Logic and reality have a distressing capacity for squashing our most intriguing hypotheses.’
‘And where was this “last sighting”?’
‘Footscrow House. Then a care home. Some of the staff saw her in the evening. Next morning, no sign of her. And there hasn’t been from that day to this.’
‘Hm.’ Carole nodded thoughtfully. ‘So, you didn’t get any impression of hidden rifts within the Garner family?’
‘Sadly, no.’ Malk related how father and mother had been happy to have their grown-up daughter living with them and Anita herself had seemed equally contented with the arrangement. Her parents had felt confident she would leave home eventually to get married, ‘but the right man hasn’t come along yet’.
Yes, she had had boyfriends, but none of them seemed to last that long. Anita might be a little cast down at the end of each relationship; not for long, though. She was resilient and bounced back quickly. It was Mrs Garner’s view that her daughter had ‘never been properly in love’. And back then she’d reckoned ‘there was time enough for that’.
No, Anita had never got depressed. She ‘had her head screwed on all right’. She wasn’t the sort to ‘get all teary’ over a man. She had more sense.
And yes, Mrs Garner was sure there had been men at work who’d come on to her from time to time. For an attractive young woman, that went with the territory. But Anita had been quite capable of telling any man who tried it on ‘to keep his hands to himself’. And she’d never complained to her mother about suffering ‘unwanted advances’.
Malk Penberthy, like the conscientious reporter he was, had followed up at a good few of Anita Garner’s places of work, the shops, pubs and restaurants where she had been employed. And he had found the girl to have been well-liked in all of them. She could take a joke and had joined in the usual badinage of workplace flirtation. She had even on occasion gone out with colleagues, but nothing serious seemed to have developed with any of them.
‘What about,’ asked Carole, ‘relationships in her final job? At Footscrow House when it was a care home?’
‘Nothing substantiated there.’
She was quick to pounce on the words. ‘“Nothing substantiated”? Are you suggesting there were rumours?’
For the first time, Malk Penberthy looked uncomfortable. ‘Oh, there are always rumours around any workplace. Bosses coming on to workers, that kind of thing. Once again, goes with the territory. And it was worse back then, before all this “Me Too” movement started. Those were the days when a licence to let one’s hands wander was reckoned to be one of the perks of management. No young girl would have had the nerve to report anything. But, when I was investigating it, I got no proof that anything of the kind happened at the care home.’
Carole’s instinct to ask supplementary questions was curbed by the ex-journalist continuing quickly, ‘There was only one work relationship of Anita’s I found out about which might have been more significant.’
And he related how, in the course of her peripatetic employment history, Anita Garner had worked behind the bar at the Cat and Fiddle, a riverside pub on the Fether, just on the edge of the South Downs. Malk had talked to its rather over-the-top landlady, Shona Nuttall, and been told that Anita had taken quite a shine to a young Spanish barman called Pablo. It was Shona’s view that, even though they were both Catholics, something quite steamy had been going on there.
Then Pablo had suddenly been called back home by news of his mother’s serious illness. His family lived in Cádiz. But Shona was convinced the young couple had stayed in touch.
‘And what is interesting,’ he warmed to his task, ‘is that Anita had never expressed any interest in travelling abroad, but – and I got this from her mother – only weeks before she disappeared, she had applied for a passport. Which arrived at the house. Her mother saw the envelope.
‘From which one might extrapolate that her daughter had got the passport simply so that she could join her lover in Spain.’
‘Did the police investigate that possibility?’
A rueful grin from Malk Penberthy. ‘Half-heartedly, if at all.’
‘Hm.’ Carole removed her rimless glasses and polished them thoughtfully.
‘Anyway, for want of something better,’ said Malk Penberthy, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of helplessness, ‘that’s the nearest I got to an explanation for Anita Garner’s disappearance.’