“Are you sure? I could always send Donovan,” I said sadistically.
I sensed the shudder. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, usual time.” Click. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye.
Richard emerged, blinking at the snow-light. “Gloria?” he asked.
“I’m reprieved for the day. She sounds like the walking dead.”
“Told you,” he said triumphantly. “Shall we make a snowman, then?”
By the time we’d made the snowman, then had a bath to restore our circulation, then done some more vigorous horizontal exercises to raise our core body temperatures, it was late afternoon and neither of us could put off work any longer. He had some copy to write for an Australian magazine fascinated by Britpop. Personally, I’d rather have cleaned the U-bend, but I’m the woman who thinks the best place for Oasis is in the bottom of a flower arrangement. I settled down at my computer and trawled the Net for responses to last night’s queries.
I downloaded everything, then started reading my way through. I immediately junked the tranche from people who thought it must be cool to be a private eye, would I give them a work-experience placement? I also quickly dumped the ones that were no more than a rehash of what had been in the papers and on the radio. That left me with half a dozen that revealed Dorothea had had a breakdown back in the 1950s. There were two that seemed to have some real credibility. The first came from someone who lived in the picturesque Lancashire town where Dorothea had grown up.
Dear Kate Brannigan, it read, I am a sixteen-year-old girl and I live in Halton-on-Lune where Dorothea Dawson came from. My grandmother was at school with Dorothea, so when I saw your query in the astrology newsgroup, I asked her what she remembered about her.
She said Dorothea was always a bit of a loner at school, she was an only child, but there was nothing weird or spooky about her when she was growing up, she was just like everybody else. My gran says Dorothea got married to this bloke Harry Thompson who worked in the bank. She says he was a real cold fish which I think means he didn’t know how to have a good time, except I don’t know what they did then to have a good time because they didn’t have clubs or decent music or anything like that.
Anyway, Gran says Dorothea had this baby and then she went mad and had to go into the loony bin (Gran calls it that, but she really means a mental hospital). Anyway, her husband went away and was never seen again, and when Dorothea came out of the hospital after a couple of years, she only came back to pack her bags and get the next bus out.
I don’t know what happened to the baby, Gran says it probably got put in a home, which is not a good place to be brought up even if your mum is a bit barking.
I hope this helps.
Yours sincerely
Megan Hall
The other was better written. I didn’t much care; literary style wasn’t what I was after.
Dear Ms. Brannigan
It may come as a surprise that a man of my age knows how to <surf the Internet>, but I am a contemporary of Dorothea Dawson. I was a year younger than her,
That all changed when Dorothea met Harry Thompson. He was a bank clerk, good-looking in a rather grim sort of way, and he was drawn to girls inappropriately young. When they met, Dorothea was, I think, a rather young 17, and he must have been 25 or 26. He was what I think we would now call a control freak and Dorothea was always on pins lest she upset him.
Quite why she agreed to marry him none of us ever knew, though it may well have been the only route she could see by which she could escape the equally oppressive regime of her stepmother. They were married and within eighteen months Dorothea was confined to the cheerless Victorian world of the local mental hospital following an appalling experience with what we now term post-natal depression.
Harry resolutely refused to have anything to do with the child, claiming that the baby was tainted with the same madness that had claimed the mother. An ignorant and cruel man, he sought and gained a transfer to a branch of the bank in the Home Counties, handing the child over to an adoption agency. What became of the baby, I have no knowledge. This far on, I am ashamed to say that neither my sister nor I can remember if the child were a boy or girl; in my sister’s defense, I would say that by that time, thanks to Harry, there was little contact between her and Dorothea.
When she finally was allowed to leave the mental hospital, Dorothea was very bitter and wanted to cast her past entirely from her. My sister was saddened by this, but not surprised. We were delighted to see her rise to celebrity, though both horrified by the news of her death.
I do hope this is of some assistance. Should you wish to talk to me, you will find me in the Wakefield telephone book under my parish of St. Barnabas-nextthe-Wall.
With best wishes
Rev. Tom Harvey
I wasn’t surprised that Gloria had called the whole sorry business tragic. I couldn’t help wondering where Harry Thompson was now and what he was doing. Not to mention the mysterious baby. I kept having visions of a swaddling-wrapped infant abandoned on the doorstep of the local orphanage. I think I saw too many BBC classic serials when I was a child.
It was time for some serious digging, the kind that is well beyond my limited capabilities with electronic systems. I copied the two key e-mails to Gizmo, with a covering note explaining that I needed him to use his less advertised skills to unearth all he could about Harry Thompson and the riddle of the adopted child. Then I started accessing what legitimate data sources were available on a Sunday evening to answer the queries that had come in from the two foreign agencies.
When the doorbell rang, I exited the database I’d been in and severed my connection. Those on-line services charge by the minute and I wasn’t prepared to put myself in hock if it took me five minutes to dislodge a Jehovah’s Witness or a local opportunist offering to dig my car out of snow that would probably be gone by morning. To my astonishment, it was Gizmo. “I just sent you an e-mail,” I said.
“I know, I got it.” He marched in without waiting to be asked, stamping slush into my hall carpet. On the way to the spare room that doubles as my home office, he shed a parka that looked like it had accompanied Scott to the Antarctic and had only just made it home again. By the time I’d hung it up, he was ensconced in front of my computer. “Gotta beer?”
I was shocked. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Gizmo with any kind of liquid within three feet of a keyboard. Same with food. If it wasn’t for thirst and hunger and bodily functions, I’ve often
Gizmo went for the elderberry beer. Judging by the look on his face as it hit his taste buds, he’d have preferred a can of supermarket own-brand lager. I sat on the edge of the bed and sipped the Stoly and grapefruit juice I’d sensibly sorted for myself. “You were about to tell me what was in my e-mail that made you rush round,” I lied.
Gizmo shifted in his seat and wrapped his legs around each other. I’d seen it done in cartoons, but I’d always thought until then it was artistic license. “I felt like some fresh air.” Lie number one. I shook my head. “I was a bit worried about discussing hacking in e-mail that wasn’t encrypted.” Lie number two. I shook my head again. “I wanted to check what virus protection you’ve got running on this machine because I’ve not looked at it for a while and there’s all sorts of clever new shit out there.”