Dying Flames (11 page)

“Who?”

“Isn't that your boyfriend's name?”

“Oh,
Dar
ren! I'd forgotten him. I haven't seen him for
ages.
”

“Can't be much more than ten days,” said Graham. “You mentioned him in Green Park.”

“It seems like ages, so much has been going on. I'm single and looking at the moment.”

Graham felt quietly pleased. He couldn't think of any young man in Hepton Magna who would fit the bill for a sophisticated young Romfordian.

“How are things at home?” he asked.

“Same as when we were there. I left a note on the table so she knows where we are when she eventually comes home.”

“That was sensible. You didn't go to the police?”

“Oh, no. Grandad says he's told them she's gone missing, and I don't see they need to know any more than that. The less they start bothering themselves with Adam and me the better.”

That was a sentiment Graham could only agree with.

For the rest of the week Christa went about the business of settling in. She took over the cooking, which was mainly for her and Graham, since Adam preferred lunch at school, which left him free (if occasionally hungry) in the evenings. He opted to spend his evenings with his growing circle of friends, which Graham had to tell himself was absolutely normal. Christa began the same process of finding a circle of young people of her own age, and on Friday evening went into Bury St. Edmunds with them, describing it as dullsville, but quite pleasant. Unspoken between her and Graham was the fact that Peggy had not rung. One day when Christa was out, he rang Mrs. Poulson, the next-door neighbor he had spoken to on his first visit to the Webster house. She said there was no sign of life in the house, beyond the fact that Christa had come and gone. He phoned the Halliburtons as well, and they said there had been no sign of Peggy at the shop. They didn't think there was any need to worry.

On Sunday he took Christa and Adam to visit their grandmother in Stanway, making sure they rang her first to assure her they weren't being dumped on her and would just be with her for a couple of hours or so.

“That was sensible,” said Christa in the car. “I don't know why she thinks she's going to be landed with us for life, but she does.”

“Grandparents are the new exploited class,” said Graham. “Their children go out to work, both parents, and they dump their littlies on the oldies without even having the decency to pay them.”

“It's not as though she would have to wheel me round all day in a pram,” said Adam.

“True. But she probably realizes that it's when children become teenagers that the problems start,” said Graham.

“I don't know why you should say that. I've been no trouble. You don't know what problems are
yet.
”

They all laughed, but Graham was conscious that Adam's remarks were both good-natured and true.

Mrs. Webster was the perfect stage granny from the neck up, but she was clad in tracksuit bottoms and trainers lower down, and as she said with a wry smile, “I'm damned if I was going to put on Sunday best for you lot.” She'd put together a table of cold meats and salads in the two hours since they had rung, and she had also had the foresight to forget about “afters” so that she could send the “children” on the ten-minute walk to the nearest supermarket. Graham knew she wanted to talk, and, watched by three censorious cats, he gave her a succinct account of the events of the past week.

“It's all in character,” she said when he had finished. “Peggy always did exactly as she pleased, all the time she was married to my son Harry. No other consideration entered into it.”

“I gather she even swindled her father out of the house.”

“That's right. She got it for a song simply by refusing to pay the rest she was owing. Though she paid in a way. It was the last straw for my Harry: he'd winked at all sorts of behavior—moral, legal, sexual behavior that was way over the limits. But he drew the line on her cheating her dad. There was no way he could pay off what was owing, so he just took off.”

“When was this?”

“About ten years ago, just after they moved to Milton Terrace. Christa was old enough to understand something of what happened.”

“And now Harry is married again, I believe?”

“Yes, he is. You're thinking of Adam, I suppose—I know how upset he is about losing contact. I'm afraid Harry is the type who makes one bad choice after another. His wife seems to make him happy, but it's by keeping him completely under her thumb. There's no way she's going to take responsibility for Adam—they have two of their own, so that's understandable, especially when he's been paying maintenance for Christa as well. But the wife puts everything she can think of in the way of Harry ever seeing the boy. I'll try to talk to him at work tomorrow, tell him where Adam is, and maybe he can get down on the pretext of coming to see me.”

“Where does he live?”

“Stevenage. Not much of a place, to my way of thinking.”

“If you had a bet, what would you say is Peggy's game?”

“Satisfaction of a whim…initially anyway. Very nice, very self-pleasing, perhaps just a bit of good fun. She was like that when I knew her—she and Harry came here often—and I've no doubt she's like that now. Never could look ahead, not even by a couple of hours. She's always enjoyed flirting with danger. That may be what she's doing now.”

“That's exactly what I'm afraid of,” said Graham.

And his unease increased as, day by day, they heard nothing whatever of Peggy.

When Christa went back to Romford on the Monday, Graham decided to spend the next few days getting to know Adam. This proved to be more difficult than he had expected. He got to know him rather as a bus driver might say he had got to know a commuter. Adam was perpetually in and out, forever in transit, and since he fixed himself a sandwich whenever he needed food, they did little more than hail each other in passing. When Graham saw Adam in the outside world, he seemed to be surrounded by two or three of an army of friends, always talking and laughing.

Graham remembered Christa saying on the night of the dinner that Adam didn't have friends as other people had them. If she was right then, there had been a miraculous transformation. Graham could not attribute it to himself, so he had to conclude that it was Adam's being liberated from Peggy that had had such a promising effect. He tried to put himself in Adam's mind to understand the change, but failed dismally. He wondered whether the change was only cosmetic—whether these boys he saw him with were not in fact “friends” even in the schoolboy sense, but only acquaintances, perhaps even fans. With the revival of sport as a national obsession, prowess at any game probably scored highly in secondary schools. On the other hand, appearances were against such a reading of the situation. There was mutual pleasure in each other's company written over all their faces and bodies, and Adam was in or out of most of their houses every evening.

“You can bring your mates here whenever you want,” Graham said to the boy one evening.

“Oh, they'd like that, just to see what the writer's house is like,” Adam said. “Just the once.”

“Why only once?”

“Well, they've all got mums when we get hungry. I wouldn't want you to have to make food for that lot.”

Graham didn't greatly fancy it either. And he was quite sure the food, by their lights, wouldn't be much good.

“I'm beginning to get worried about your mother,” he said, the next evening, when Adam was just in and not quite off to bed.

“Are you? I never think about her.”

Graham didn't think this was, or could be, true.

“It's over a week now. There may come a point when the police will find it odd if we don't make a bit of a fuss.”

Adam considered this.

“She might have met up with that stupid long-lost son. Probably she's made it up with him, and they're all lovey-dovey somewhere or other in London.”

“It's one of the possibilities. But when he left Luigi's, he was almost as angry with her as you were.”

After a few minutes Adam said:

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Terry is your son.”

“Apparently.”

“And it's not surprising she's so happy, when he was her first child, and she was forced to give him up.”

Graham remembered Ted Somers's mutter that there was no pressure on her from her parents.

“If she was forced to give him up,” he said.

“Yeah, that's the thing…. You have to look at everything she says, check it if you can, to see if it's true,” said Adam at once. “I'm fed up with it.”

That was as near as Adam came to opening his heart.

It was a great joy and relief to Graham that he did not have to consider Adam in any way as a suspect. If Peggy's body had been found in the streets of Romford, the son whom she had so publicly quarreled with would have to have been near the top of any policeman's list. But the idea of him meeting up with her, murdering her, then spiriting her away (how?) or finding a hiding place for the body that had kept her hidden for over a week—all these were not possibilities: they were beyond belief. Anyway, Adam was probably with his friend Mickey Leatherby and his parents at the relevant time, and then with Graham and Christa for the rest of the night.

“Is it all right if I go to Romford tomorrow?” Graham asked Adam the next day.

“Course it is. I've got a key.”

“There's one or two people I think I should talk to there. And then I'm wondering if I should go to the police.”

“The police? I've thought about them since you mentioned them.” Adam was all tensed up now. “Won't they wonder about us?”

“Well, I thought I could tell them that I'm a sort of stepfather to you both. That should square things with them and reassure them that you're safe and well. Like I said, I'm afraid of them getting suspicious if we report her disappearance, then don't give any sign afterwards that we're worried about her…. I think I could handle them better than your grandfather.”

“That wouldn't be hard!” said Adam. “He's not good with people. He gets on better with cars.”

“How much has he had to do with your mother in recent years?”

Adam looked surprised. “Nothing. I never remember him having anything to do with her. I'd never seen them together before that meal on Monday.”

Adam had his hand on the door handle, but Graham suddenly said:

“You do realize, Adam, don't you, that this is your home for as long as you want or need it to be? You and Christa, of course.”

Adam shuffled.

“What? Oh, I thought maybe, but…I didn't
know.
I'm very grateful…. Thank you.”

And he scooted out of the door.

Graham immediately turned his novelist's analytical brain on himself. He couldn't decide why he had said this
now.
It seemed to have just come out. But it must have been lurking there somewhere in the back of his mind. He had promised Adam a home until adulthood. It couldn't have been just his burgeoning love for Christa that had led him to make such a large commitment of himself, his time, his money. He decided he must, in an odd way, feel he had escaped his rightful burden of responsibility with Terry. He had not been told, of course, but would he have taken it up in any meaningful way if he had been told?

And now he was taking it up with Peggy's other two children. They had hauled themselves through childhood with no security and precious little love. Now at least he could provide the first, and in Christa's case the second too. For as long as she would let him. Until some other man took over that duty. He had never yet seen any indication from Christa that she had for a moment considered him in a romantic role.

Graham left a message at the home of Christa's friend Josie: he would pick her up at the Jeremy Bentham College at around five o'clock. The next day he drove to Romford, and as long as the country roads lasted, he pondered what he was doing.

Peggy had “disappeared” sometime during the late evening or night of a week ago Monday. He put the word
disappeared
in quotes in his mind because she had either been put out of commission in some way (kidnapped, killed, illegally detained), or she had gone off willingly. Considering the note she had left, he rather inclined to the last explanation, but he had to admit that the situation could have developed dangerously later on.

This meant, surely, that the solution to the mystery had to lie in Romford. Peggy had left Luigi's intent on searching for Terry and making it up with him. Her intention presumably was to comb the streets of Romford until she found him. While doing this, she either herself decided to disappear (problems, emotional or financial, that only she knew about?), or was persuaded to go away, or forcibly taken. The last solution seemed to him unlikely: the message left in the house in Milton Terrace did not sound like a forced or dictated message. In fact it had sounded typically Peggy, as he, with his creative imagination, had come to see her. And it had been accepted by Christa as having been written by Peggy.

He realized that he was trying to view the situation as a policeman or a private detective might view it: dispassionately and logically noting all the pertinent features of the case and reviewing all the probabilities. He hoped he might be able to find a policeman in Romford who would view the facts from the same perspective but with more professional expertise and experience.

His first port of call, using his
A to Z,
was Ted Somers. He lived—alone now—in a bungalow on Silverdale Street, bought no doubt at the time when Peggy had wheedled the house in Milton Terrace away from him. The bungalow was neat and square, just the sort of manageable place a retired couple liked, and the garden was predictably well cared for. Ted had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with. That was also suggested when he opened the door.

“Mr. Broadbent! I didn't expect—”

“Graham, please. I hope I'm not unwelcome.”

“Not in the least. Come in. Coffee?”

“Please.”

“There's some brewed. I live on coffee all morning to keep myself awake. What brings you here?”

“I'm fetching Christa from college this evening. But it's actually Peggy who brings me here.”

“I could have guessed. It's getting worrying.”

“You felt that too?”

“I did. Though I don't see it's your worry.”

“It's the children's, or should be. Has she gone off with anyone for this long before?”

“Search me. I'd had nothing to do with her for over ten years, and until recently very little to do with the children. What do they say about her going off unexpectedly?”

“I've tried not to pry too closely. I do get the impression that it's longer than has happened before, but they're not too bothered.”

“Used to it. Of course I gathered she sometimes went off, but I didn't press them too closely, probably for the same reasons you don't want to. I said we—Mary, when she was alive, and I—were there if they needed us and left it at that. It looks like driving a wedge between mother and children if you make too much of things that shock you, and we always tried not to do that.”

“I suppose there was a time, wasn't there, when you, your wife, and Peggy were all living together? After Terry's birth and before Adam's?”

“All her life up to her marriage with Harry.” Ted sighed as he handed over a large cup of coffee and sat down over his own. “I don't want to give you the impression it was just one man after another in her life. It wasn't. But the men in her life were mostly there for a short time. A few days, a few weeks. Between these periods she went on with her life perfectly normally: jobs, learning her parts for the Romford Players,
dreaming
…She always lived partly in a dream world. Somehow her life was going to be transformed: money, fame, a dream lover. We never really talked about it, never sat her down and told her to get a grip. We were a little bit in awe of her, I think, because she was so different from us, and from anyone in our families. And we knew it would have been hopeless. But she just let fall things that told us what was going on in that imaginative little head: some of the men were ‘fabulously rich'—just ordinary local businessmen; some were ‘fantastically handsome'—pleasant-looking; talent scouts were coming to the plays specially to see her. We recognized it as childishness, and we were embarrassed by it. The wonder is she kept anybody long enough to marry him and stay married for some years.”

“So in those years she didn't have any relationship that was in some way special—lasted a while, seemed more serious?”

“Not that we knew of.” He drank from his coffee. “Mind you, we didn't know much.”

“Not even Christa's father?”

“We had no idea who he was…” As he thought, his elderly face unexpectedly crimsoned up. “We thought she didn't know herself.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because she never named anyone or went after him for maintenance.”

Graham digested this.

“She never came after me for maintenance.”

“Probably because she figured there was no chance of getting any. In any case, the baby was adopted almost immediately.”

“Maybe Christa's father was also an unlikely source of money.”

“Maybe. The truth is, we were past caring. Christa's never showed any curiosity, and we thought—Mary and I—that that was much the best way. She somehow got the idea that you were her father, and we didn't tell her anything to the contrary, though Mary always said it was just a bit of Peggy's silliness. So far as we knew, you and Peggy had never met up again.”

“We didn't. I was in Mali at the relevant time.”

“Africa somewhere? Peggy's never been to darkest Africa, I'm sure. It's not glamorous enough for her.”

Graham drained his cup.

“So what were relations between you like in those years?”

Ted always thought before replying. He liked to make himself clear.

“More and more distant. We hardly seemed to have any share in her life or her dreamworld. When she teamed up with Harry and went to live with him in a flat near the station, we were surprised and delighted. We put on a lovely wedding for them and were over the moon when Adam came along. It seemed like a replacement for the boy she'd had adopted. He was about two when she first brought up the idea of buying the house from us. You know the rest.”