It would never have occurred to Richard Marshall back then that he would get caught out in anything that he did, Karen felt. She hadn’t known then that he had already served time in jail. Had she done so she would merely have been forced to wonder at how little effect it had had on him. She pulled away from him, shaking her whole body as if to rid herself of his touch, and hurried into the kitchen, leaving him and her mother alone in the hall to make their farewells.
It was the only time that Karen ever caught the pair of them together and she had no idea whether or not they had been having a full-blown affair, or if this had been a one-afternoon stand. True to form in the Meadows household the incident was never mentioned again and Karen told nobody about it. Certainly she knew better than to mention it to her father. Neither did she tell the police, and her failure to do that was later to haunt her even though it never even occurred to her at the time.
Whatever the extent of her mother’s relationship with Richard Marshall, Karen was quite sure that something had been going on and, in spite of her youth, equally convinced that she knew what the two of them had been doing the day she came home from school early.
But if she had ever had any doubts at all, these would have been assuaged the day a major missing-persons enquiry was finally launched and Richard Marshall was arrested, almost exactly a year after his family’s disappearance. Karen had been forced to prop her mother up during yet another drinking binge combined with a bout of depression, and Margaret Meadows had made it quite clear that this latest attack of bad nerves, as the family described her condition back then, had been brought about by Richard’s arrest. She had been distraught for days, which even at the time had confused Karen considerably.
After all, it was the talk of the town that Richard had installed Esther Hunter at Parkview less than a month after his wife and children disappeared. Everyone, it seemed, including Karen and all her school friends, knew all about it. Esther Hunter was not only a hairdresser with her own business but she was also married to a popular Torquay builder who was a town councillor. She was well known locally, as, of course, was her husband. Her liaison with Richard, so unfortunately soon, it seemed, after the disappearance of Clara and the girls, was a big local scandal and it was that, as much as anything, which had focused attention on the strange events surrounding the Marshall family. Indeed, his indecent haste over Esther was generally seen to be Marshall’s motive for getting rid of his wife and children.
Karen’s mother knew all about Esther Hunter. Karen never saw her mother alone with Richard Marshall again and was pretty sure there was no longer an affair going on between them. She would have noticed, she felt certain. She was, after all, a pretty good spy. She didn’t miss much. So why had her mother been so distressed to learn that, in her words, “the police have taken Richard”?
Karen had not understood then and, to tell the truth, she did not understand now. She did know all about the mesmerizing effect Marshall seemed to have on the women in his life. He turned them into blithering idiots, it seemed to her. And she remembered well enough that although the police had not found grounds to charge Richard Marshall back in 1976, and he had been released after little more than twenty-four hours and had been able to return to the Parkview Hotel and Esther Hunter, their investigation had not stopped there. Bill Talbot himself had visited Karen’s street, high above the bay, on at least two occasions and talked to various neighbours. And naturally he had come to see Karen’s mother. Her involvement, albeit peripheral, was already on record. But Karen, although not privy to the interviews, was certain her mother had told him no more than she had the two officers whose visit she had listened to at the keyhole.
Karen also remembered being embarrassed and made to feel uneasy just by the sight of Richard Marshall and Esther Hunter together at that time. She could not avoid bumping into them occasionally, even though she would have preferred not to. Marshall remained as bold and brash as ever. Karen invariably blushed when he spoke to her. On the other hand, Esther Hunter rarely said anything. Once Karen dropped a shopping bag at her feet and Esther, a small fair woman with a big gentle smile, had helped her pick up the spilt shopping. Karen remembered her appearing to be almost as shy and awkward as she herself felt. And Karen had blushed terribly, of course.
“It’s all right, don’t worry, I drop things all the time,” Esther had reassured her. Karen remained unable to reconcile this rather homely image of Esther Hunter with that of local legend, the scarlet woman who had, without a care, stepped into the abandoned shoes of the wife whom her lover had almost certainly murdered.
Then, just a few weeks after Richard Marshall had been released without charge, two things had happened. He and Esther took off without any farewells and without leaving a forwarding address, abandoning a debt-ridden Parkview in the hands of a local estate agent, and Karen’s father left her mother. How much that had been caused by her mother’s relationship with Richard Marshall, Karen did not know. Neither did she know if her father was even aware of the affair, if that was what it had been. He could not, however, have failed to notice Margaret Meadows’ descent into alcoholic depression at the time of Marshall’s arrest, and she had made little or no attempt to conceal what had sparked it off. Then, when Marshall had moved Esther Hunter into Parkview almost a year earlier there had been a similar bout of booze-fuelled depression, accompanied by loud drunken ramblings concerning Richard’s “betrayal”, and even references to that “whore next door.” You would have had to have been a fool not to realize what it was all about, and while Karen’s father had been all manner of things, he certainly had not been that.
Karen eventually learned that her father had met another woman and was setting up home with her in Plymouth. She more or less picked that up from a mixture of local gossip and, as ever, from overhearing conversations, mostly on the phone between her mother and someone she guessed was a solicitor. Nobody actually told her anything. One day her father was living with her and her mother at Laurel House, and the next he was not. But then, communication was not a high priority in the Meadows household.
And when she asked her mother where her father was, the reply was fairly typical.
“Thinks he’s found a better offer, darling, but don’t worry, he’ll be back.”
Colin Meadows never did return, however. For the first year or so of her parents’ estrangement he would turn up about once a month to see Karen, but she could not even remember a conversation with him worthy of the name. There was always a present, usually a book token, once a sweater at least a size too small, and once, out of the blue, and far more gratefully received, a quite acceptable secondhand bicycle.
Then her father was killed in a car accident, along with the new woman in his life. And, strange though it may seem, Karen could not really remember how she reacted. Indeed, she could barely recall any reaction at all and she thought she must just have blotted it out. She remembered her mother telling her the grim news in quite a matter-of-fact way. It was the only time Karen ever heard her mother mention her father after he left home, except to pass on the arrangements for Karen’s meetings with him, which had in any case gradually become less and less frequent. Karen did not go to her father’s funeral, and could not even remember if she was given the opportunity to do so. Certainly nobody, least of all her mother, ever talked to her again about her father or the manner of his death, and she did not feel it was right, somehow, to ask. Instead Karen took her feelings inward. Something she did throughout her childhood and adolescence. Something she still bloody well did, she thought wryly.