‘Excuse me, but I want to buy a film for my camera,’ he said, when at last they got off the bus and were passing a chemist’s shop.
‘Very well, Street. I’ll be looking in the window next door. There seem to be some interesting books.’ Miss Faintley seemed pleased, Mark thought.
There were several people in the chemist’s shop. Mark waited to be served, and, whilst he was waiting, he saw that his way of escape was assured. The shop had a second entrance from a street at the back. He obtained his film and left by this further door. Out in the street, he turned and hurried back towards the bus station. A bus was just moving off. He leapt on board, climbed to the top and discovered that the bus was turning into the very street in which he had abandoned his teacher. He looked out of the window, but there was no sign of Miss Faintley.
‘Gone in to browse and forgotten all about me, the silly ass,’ thought Mark.
‘Where do you want, sonny?’ inquired the conductor. Mark replied (with a vague recollection of the map which Miss Faintley had insisted upon showing him):
‘The river. Do you go there?’
The conductor said, ‘Twopenny half,’ and clipped him a ticket. Mark got off at the bridge, stood himself a stodge at a café… fish and chips, apple pie and ice cream… and then went for a two-shilling steamer trip. He spent a thoroughly satisfactory day, had tea at the same café upon his return, and had prepared a convincing, innocent-sounding story for his parents by the time he got back to the hotel. There was only one snag. He had no idea of what Miss Faintley’s story would be. His parents, however, were out when he arrived, so he bathed and changed and went down to the lounge, hoping to find Miss Faintley and try out on her the rather reproachful remarks he had concocted.
‘I’d no idea where you’d got to,’ he would say, ‘so after I’d looked for you… not knowing Torbury and it being such a whacking big place… where did you get to, Miss Faintley? I mean, I know I must have kept you waiting a jolly long time while I bought my film, but the shop was simply packed with people, and once I’d gone in I didn’t much like to walk out again without buying anything… they might think I’d shop-lifted something…’
By this time Miss Faintley would have interrupted to give her version, Mark hoped, and the rest of the conversation would follow accordingly. Unfortunately, Miss Faintley was not in the lounge, and the story, as told to Mark’s parents at dinner, did not seem nearly as convincing as Mark had hoped. However, Mark’s father (with who knows what personal recollections of boyhood!) stemmed the tide of his wife’s remonstrances.
‘It’s all right, Margaret. Nothing’s happened. The only thing is… where has Miss Faintley got to? She certainly isn’t in here, and dinner goes off at nine.’
Miss Faintley was not at breakfast, either. Mark did not go for an early swim; it was raining. He met the girl who had spoken to him the morning before, and found that she was accompanied by a quietly-discomforting old woman as yellow as the gamboge in Mark’s paint-box and as extravagantly dressed as a macaw. The younger woman came up to him after breakfast.
‘The rain’s stopped. I’m going in. Coming?’ Mark thought he might as well. He said as much, and went upstairs to get his things. When he came back into the hotel vestibule the manager was there, talking to his father. Both turned to Mark. ‘What about this Miss Faintley who took you out yesterday? You know she hasn’t come back to the hotel,’ the manager said. Mark said he was sorry. He did know, but had no helpful observations to offer.
‘I suppose you mean she hasn’t paid,’ he said. ‘She’s a teacher at our school, so I suppose she’ll pay all right, in the end, you know.’
‘I hope so, but that isn’t what’s worrying us, sonny. I’ve rung the hospital and the police station at Torbury. Neither knows anything about her.’
‘Any reason to suppose there’s any funny business?’ asked Mark’s father.
‘No, but one has to inquire when guests don’t come back at night. Have you known the lady long, Mr Street, may I ask?’
‘I forgot when she first came,’ Mark replied at a glance from his father. ‘Nobody at school likes her much,’ he added, ‘but you don’t seem to think of her doing anything queer. Of course, she might have got drowned,’ he added helpfully. At this moment his acquaintance of the previous morning, her handsome frame draped in slacks and a Sloppy Joe, came to the foot of the stairs. She carried a waterproof bag. Thankfully Mark gathered up his own belongings and followed the girl to the swing-door. In less than ten minutes they were both in the water.
‘What’s the trouble?’ the girl asked, as both of them surfaced. ‘The manager looked a bit jaundiced, I thought… or is that my imagination?’
Mark explained, quite truthfully, exactly what had happened on the previous day.
‘Of course, if I’d known, I wouldn’t have left her,’ Mark concluded.
‘Why not? You couldn’t have known she would drop out like that. Where do you suppose she’s got to?’
‘I don’t know. I keep wondering. She’s an awful ass, but… well, I mean, it isn’t the asses who disappear usually, is it? It’s people who are making a getaway. I’m sure Miss Faintley isn’t one of those. She wouldn’t have pluck enough, for one thing. I say, what’s your name?’
‘Laura Menzies. I know yours. I saw it in the visitors’ book when we arrived. You’re Mark Street, aren’t you? I’ll call you Mark and you’d better call me Laura.’
‘All right,’ agreed Mark. ‘Race you to the diving-raft!’
He gave himself a generous lead by setting off as the words left his mouth, but Laura Menzies beat him easily and had hoisted herself on to the raft by the time he had threshed his way to it and was holding on to the side.
‘Not bad,’ she said casually. ‘I expect you do most of your swimming in a public bath, don’t you?’
Mark admitted that he did, and clambered out to sit beside her.
‘I say,’ he said, ‘old Faintley, you know. What do you honestly think? I mean, if she’d been run over she’d have been taken to hospital, and what was funniest… only I haven’t told anybody yet… you know that bookshop she went to when I left her to buy my film? Well, she wasn’t there any more. I mean, she wasn’t inside, either, because I could see in from the top of the bus. At the time I thought what a bit of luck, but now I’m beginning to wonder whether she might have thought it wasn’t a bad idea to push off by herself after all.’
‘There’s something in that.’
‘I think so, too. After all, why did she want to take me out in the first place? It wasn’t as though I’d got nothing else to do. You don’t suppose…’ he hitched himself round to look at her instead of continuing to watch his own feet gently scuffling in the sea… ‘you don’t suppose she was using me for some kind of cover? I’ve read of things like that. Do you think she could have got mixed up with some sort of gang, and took me with her to put them off the scent?’
‘You said she wasn’t the type,’ Laura pointed out. ‘Look here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll push over to Torbury myself after lunch and have a snoop round.’
‘The police will have done that already, I expect.’
‘Not until they’ve had a talk with you. You’re the only direct source of information.’
‘Oh, heck!’ said Mark, dismayed. Like many boys of his age, he was afraid of policemen. He always imagined they might pounce on him for something done in school in which he had had no hand, and that the usual code would oblige him to take the rap and tell no tales. ‘I can’t tell them a single thing except what I’ve told you and my father and the manager, and none of it helps at all. I don’t see,’ he added, voicing his chief grievance, ‘why it had to be me this happened to. We’ve always lost the teachers on school outings, and nothing has ever happened to any of them before, or to any of us, either!’