She nodded wordlessly.
“And it will sound more convincing if I take part in the story too,” he added.
“Thank you.” Marilyn’s voice was husky. “You needn’t tell them the bit about your finding out the truth early on and not telling them. They might blame you for that.”
“They probably will,” he agreed drily. “And quite right too. But we’re telling them the whole thing this time, Mari. And if a bit of the blame is transferred from you to me I guess I can take that all right.”
“You’re—you’re rather a dear, really.” Marilyn
gulped slightly. “I’ll be sure to—to tell Pat, when we find her.”
Then the poignancy of that last phrase struck on her heart and she bent her head to hide her tears.
“All right—don’t cry about it,” he said, a trifle roughly. “I’ll go and phone now. You sit there and get your courage up. And you might start thinking out some telling phrases for when we have to put the story as well as we can.”
He went away to the callbox at the back of the restaurant, and Marilyn, anxious and forlorn though she still felt—and dreading the scene which was to come—somehow gathered a certain degree of comfort from the sheer fact that Jerry Penrose felt he knew her well enough to be almost rude to her.
Apparently he had better luck than she had had over the matter of getting the right people together. He was back again in a short time, with the information that both Marilyn’s parents would be waiting for them at the flat in half an hour.
“Were they scared when you said it was about Pat and that we wanted to see them together?” Marilyn enquired.
“He was. He thought it was bad news and that I felt your mother would need his support when it was given.”
“You reassured him, I hope?”
“Partially.” Jerry Penrose’s usually kind eyes looked rather hard.
“Why only partially?” Marilyn was suddenly indignant on her father’s behalf.
“He was the one who walked out on his responsibilities, wasn’t he
?
”
“Oh, but it wasn’t as simple as that!” Marilyn was nearly as shocked as her mother would have been. “Mother says—”
“All right. Come along. At least I was much more careful with her. I told her simply that there was an interesting development and I’d like to come along and tell her about it. I didn’t even mention that your father would be coming. I didn’t want to frighten
her.”
“It doesn’t seem quite fair,” began Marilyn.
“We won’t start handing out the bouquets and the brickbats yet,” he interrupted. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, of course! We’d better take a taxi, hadn’t we?”
“No. We’re taking a bus.”
“The taxi’s on me, if you’re hard up,” Marilyn assured him. “You’re doing this for my family, after all.”
“I’m not hard up,” Jerry Penrose said. “At least, no more so than usual. But we don’t want to arrive too early. It’s vital that your father should get there first and realise that we couldn’t possibly have had a useful chat with your mother before he came.”
“That’s true.” Marilyn shot him an admiring glance, and followed him meekly to the bus stop.
But both her patience and her nerves were sorely tried on that long bus ride. When she thought of the ordeal in front of her she would have liked the journey to last for ever. But when she thought of the terrifying mystery of Pat’s genuine disappearance she was wild with impatience to set some sort of enquiry in motion.
“How can we tell if Dad’s arrived or not?” she asked timidly as they approached the familiar block.
“He’ll be there,” replied Jerry, with the cool confidence of one whose arrangements usually worked. Then he added a trifle ruthlessly, “I frightened him just enough for that. Which was the idea.”
As they went up in the lift together he took her hand unselfconsciously and gave it an encouraging squeeze.
“In half an hour the worst will be over,” he reminded her, and she managed to respond with a faint smile.
It was her father who opened the door before she could even put her key in the lock, thus settling any doubt about his being there first. He looked drawn and somehow older than Marilyn had ever supposed him to be, and he said in a rapid undertone to Jerry Penrose.
“If it’s really bad news, tell her gen
tl
y. She’s had about all she can stand.”
“It’s not what you mean by really bad news,” Jerry replied categorically. “It’s puzzling and requires a good deal of explanation first. Then we’ll have to do some hard thinking about action instead of just waiting for something to happen.”
Gregory Collamore looked faintly reassured, though puzzled too at the authoritative way this young man seemed to have taken over the direction of events. And Marilyn noticed that, when they all went into the sitting-room together, her father sat down on the settee beside her mother, as though he had been there before their arrival and still felt she might need the support of his presence.
“Jerry, how kind of you
!”
Clare held out her hand to him and smiled anxiously. “This must mean you’ve been trying to help us again.”
“Not as much as I should, Mrs. Collamore,” he replied frankly. “There’s a long story to tell, and we may as well say right away that it begins with Marilyn having to confess that Pat and she originally engineered Pat’s disappearance.”
Marilyn, who had not quite expected to be flung in at the deep end like this, gasped at the ruthlessness of Jerry’s tactics. But she instantly recognised their irresistible force as well, for there was simply no doubting the genuineness of her mother’s astounded horror and anger as she cried:
“
Mari!
You—and Pat? Oh, you couldn’t have done anything so wicked! Why should you?—
Why?”
Wordlessly, Marilyn stood before her parents, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, the picture of guilt and remorse.
“I don’t understand!” Clare pushed back her hair with both her hands. “What have I or your father ever done that you should inflict such misery on us? Don’t you
know
what you made us suffer? The torture of that first evening—that useless journey
—
oh, everything! I can’t believe it of you!” And she actually buried her face in her hands, as though to shut out the sight of her guilty daughter, while Greg put a comforting hand on her shoulder and looked sternly at Marilyn.
“Why did you do it?” he said helplessly. “Didn’t you care about hurting your mother—or me?”
“It—it wasn’t that we wanted to hurt you.” Marilyn spoke through dry lips. “It was just—” She made a futile sort of gesture with her hands. “We wanted you to come home—” she said with forlorn simplicity. And then she began to cry—desperately, hopelessly, without even putting up her hands to her face.
“You wanted—?” Her mother raised her head and stared at her.
“You wanted—” it was her father who spoke through dry lips now—“you wanted me as much as that?”
Marilyn nodded, and her harsh, almost childish sobs seemed to tear little rents in the silence of the room.
Jerry Penrose moved as though to go to her, but Gregory Collamore stopped him with a swift gesture, and he himself went to his daughter and took her in his arms.
“Don’t,” he said at last. “Don’t cry like that, child.” And he put his cheek down against the top of her head. “It was a terrible—a ridiculous thing to do. But I think I understand.”
“Greg
!”
Clare spoke half in astonishment and half in protest. But he looked across at her over Marilyn’s head and said,
“It was just as you insisted to me. We failed them.”
“No, you mustn’t blame yourselves too much.” Marilyn looked up then and spoke between gulps. “We were wrong, Pat and I. I see that now.” Then she looked at her mother’s pale, distressed face and with a little cry of remorse she ran to her and, kneeling beside her, flung her arms round her.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” she said. And once again she seemed unable to get further than the bald, simple statement.
“All right.” Bewilderedly, Clare ran a singularly gentle hand over her child’s dishevelled hair. Then she looked at Jerry Penrose and asked, “Do you think you could finish the story
?
”
“If Marilyn prefers it that way.”
“Yes, please.” Marilyn’s face was half hidden against her mother and her voice was muffled.
So, lucidly and concealing nothing, Jerry went over the story from the moment of Pat’s disappearance until she telephoned to him at his office, at which point Clare interrupted reproachfully.
“You mean
you
realised then that the whole thing was a hoax
?
”
“Yes,” said Jerry resolutely.
“But you should have told us! Don’t you think it was unpardonable for you yourself to join in the deception
?
”
“Yes, I do,” he admitted frankly. “But I’m afraid I indulged in some muddled thinking at that point. I was reluctant to interfere too insistently in another family’s affairs. Though I think I was wrong now.”
“I persuaded him,” Marilyn interrupted doggedly. “Both Pat and I played on his kindness and good nature. It was our fault.”
“Oh, Mari!” exclaimed her mother. While her father said grimly,
“Don’t you think you’d better finish the tale yourself, young woman? Otherwise we’re going to put some of the blame in the wrong place.”
“Yes.” Marilyn, who had recovered some of her natural courage and resolution by now, flashed Jerry a grateful smile for all his support and then, in a husky voice, took up the story. When she came to the visit of the policeman the previous evening, her father exclaimed almost violently,
“Wasn’t
that
enough to make you confide in us?”
“I still thought it was only a temporary crisis,” Marilyn explained timidly. “I knew she’d be short of money, of course, after losing her bag. But it seemed to me she’d get by all right for twenty-four hours if she pawned her watch or her bracelet or something—”
“Her bracelet!” interrupted Clare, glancing at her husband, who nodded shortly.
“It wasn’t until I got to the garage this morning and found there was no message—no sign at all from Pat—that I realised something must be terribly wrong.”
“But you were there rather early in the day, weren’t you, Mari
?
She might not have got there until later,” suggested Clare, clinging to the only faint hope which offered.
But Marilyn shook her head despondently.
“She’d have got there at the first possible moment, Mother. She
had
to. Why should she delay? She’d already managed to let me know there would be a message there, and her need to contact me had become even more urgent than before.”
“Perhaps she hadn’t the money for a bus fare,” Clare said desperately. “Perhaps she had to walk quite a long distance.”
“What’s the name of the garage, Marilyn?” her father asked abruptly.
She told him, and added the telephone number when she saw him move towards the phone. Then they all watched silently while he called the garage and asked if there were any message for the young lady who had made enquiries that morning.
From his expression they knew the answer even before he put down the receiver and said grimly, “Nothing.”
“That girl—who had her bracelet—” Again Clare looked at her husband.
“Yes, I was thinking of that.” Greg fished in his pockets and brought out an envelope with a number scribbled on the back. “At least I have the number of the car. If I go along to the police now—”
“Ah, that’s better!” exclaimed Jerry, who had been a silent spectator of the family scene for some minutes now. “Let’s have some action. We’ve none of us had our priorities right in the last few days. The one thing that matters now is
to find Pat.”
“Of course!” Clare smiled at him gratefully, almost as though he were a member of the family. But Greg, who of course had never seen him before in his life, seemed to think the young man a trifle officious.
“It’s very good of you to have taken so much interest—so much trouble,” he said stiffly. “And we owe you a debt for bringing Marilyn to her senses and making her come and tell us the truth. But now that—”
“That’s all right, sir,” interrupted Jerry, firmly but kindly. “I’m in this too, if you don’t mind. I’ve got Marilyn’s interests warmly at heart.”
“Pat’s,” corrected Marilyn, in the interests of accuracy.
But he looked at her and grinned.
“Marilyn’s,” he repeated. “Allow me to know my own mind. I think you’re a tiresome little idiot, and you probably deserve a good spanking for the way you’ve behaved to your parents. But you called me into this business yourself, and I’m going to see you out of your present troubles whatever anyone says.”
“Are you?” Marilyn stared at him, wide-eyed, as though she really saw him for the first time.
And in all the fog of misery and anxiety and guilt which enveloped her there was suddenly a bright shaft of light, just because Jerry Penrose had said she was a tiresome little idiot but he had her interests warmly at heart.