Anna, Where Are You?

CHAPTER III

It was about a week later that Detective Inspector Abbott was taking tea with Miss Maud Silver, whom he regarded with a good deal of the fondness of a nephew together with a respect not always accorded to the spinster aunt. Spinster Miss Silver certainly was and had never desired to be otherwise. With a most indulgent heart towards young lovers, and a proper regard for the holy estate of matrimony, she never regretted her own independent position. Aunt to Frank Abbott she was not, but the tie between them was a strong one. His irreverent sense of humour was continually delighted by her idiosyncrasies, the primness of her appearance, her fringe, her beaded slippers, her quotations from Lord Tennyson, the rapid play of the knitting-needles in her small competent hands, her moral maxims, and the inflexibility of her principles. But with and behind all this there was an affection, an admiration, and a respect very rarely displayed but always there to be reckoned with. From their first encounter down to this present day these feelings had continued to increase and to be the source, as he once informed her, of both pleasure and profit.

He had done full justice to the three kinds of sandwich, the scones, and the layer-cake which Hannah Meadows had produced for his benefit. Ordinary visitors did not get scone as well as sandwich, nor did Hannah produce for them the honey sent up from the country by Mrs. Randal March, but Mr. Frank would always be welcomed with the best of everything. Not that Hannah approved of the Police as a profession for a gentleman any more than she considered private detection to be a suitable occupation for a lady, though in the course of years she had become inured to the social changes which made such a state of affairs possible.

No one could have looked less like a policeman than the young man now passing his cup to be filled for the third time. From his very fair hair, slicked back and mirror-smooth, to the well-cut shoes polished to an equal brilliance, he presented a most elegant picture. The suit, the handkerchief, the socks, the tie- all had a touch of distinction. There was an effect of slender height. The pale complexion, the long nose, the pale blue eyes, imparted a fastidious air. The hand stretched out to take his cup was noticeably well kept and of the same long, thin shape as the foot in the shining shoe.

He talked discursively and enjoyed his tea. Crime, it appeared, was booming, and the criminal elusive. There were some very tricky forgeries on the market. One of the few privately owned services of gold plate had been lifted, and had apparently vanished into thin air. At the moment he was being rueful over a bank hold-up.

“There are too many of them, and that’s a fact. Small branch on the London fringes. Sort of place that has forgotten to be a village without quite managing to be a town. In fact, what Tennyson had in mind when he wrote, ‘Standing with reluctant feet, where the brook and river meet.’ ”

Miss Silver’s partiality for the Victorian poet laureate being notorious, this was a challenge. She accepted it mildly.

“It was not, as you know, intended to have that application, the subject of the poem being maidenhood, and the poet, Longfellow.”

He reached for a sandwich.

“Another good quotation wasted! Anyhow, the place is Enderby Green, and the bank manager was held up and shot dead, poor chap, just before closing time yesterday afternoon. A young clerk got a bullet through his shoulder and is lucky to be alive. There had been some big sums paid in that day-all the shops were having sales-and the chap got away with fifteen hundred pounds. Now everyone wants to know what the police are doing. Funny for us! I expect you’ve seen about it in the papers.”

Miss Silver inclined her head.

“Was he not seen? Did nobody hear the shot?”

“There was a pneumatic drill working outside. I don’t suppose anyone would have noticed a machine-gun, let alone a couple of revolver shots! The clerk’s description wouldn’t fit more than about two or three hundred thousand people-except for red hair which nobody would go out gunning with unless as a disguise for the occasion. The lad did one rather bright thing though. He was making an entry in red ink at the time the hold-up occurred, and he managed to smear some of the notes they made him hand over. He says he doesn’t think the chap noticed.”

“The clerk will recover?”

“Oh, yes. The other poor chap was shot down in cold blood-he hadn’t a chance. Somebody saw a car drive off and was able to describe it. But of course it was stolen, and got rid of as soon as possible-found abandoned not half a mile away. The bother is there have been too many of these shows, and a tendency to ask what the police are paid for. You may yet see me playing a barrel-organ on the kerb and holding out my cap for coppers. Or I might do a great disappearing act on my own. ‘Well Known Detective Inspector Vanishes. Loss Of Memory Or Murder?’ It would make very good headlines. And then when I turned up again I could sell my life story to the Sunday papers-‘A Blank World. What It Feels Like To Be Lost.’ Quite a tempting prospect.”

Miss Silver smiled.

“My dear Frank, you really do talk very great nonsense.”

He took another sandwich and said,

“I wonder how many of the missing people whose husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and cousins and aunts come clamouring to Scotland Yard are really lost?”

Miss Silver was filling her own cup. She said in a noncommittal tone,

“I suppose there are statistics.”

“I don’t mean that sort of thing. I mean, how many of them cut loose because they have got to the point where they feel they can’t go on any longer? The husband has had one girl friend too many, or got drunk just once too often. The wife has nagged until the man thinks he had better get out before he does her in. The boy or the girl just can’t stand being asked all the time, ‘Where did you go-what did you do-whom did you see?’ The routine of the shop, or the office, or the factory just gets them where they feel they are going to smash things up unless they clear out. Statistics only give you the facts-lost, stolen, or strayed-so many human cattle. They don’t give you the reasons behind the facts.”

Miss Silver gave a gentle meditative cough.

“Loss of memory is too often advanced as an explanation to be a very credible one. That there are such cases, I do not doubt, and they must, I fear, be the cause of a great deal of suffering- the sudden shock of disappearance, the continued strain, the anguish of longing so beautifully expressed by Lord Tennyson in two of his best known xlines-‘Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.’ But it is only too easy an explanation when a missing person has been traced and desires to avoid the social and domestic consequences of a voluntary disappearance.”

Frank laughed.

“Do you remember a case which was in all the papers a few years ago? A young woman disappeared in the neighbourhood of a large garrison town. She had a father, a stepmother, and the usual quota of friends, but no one seems to have bothered. There had been rows with the stepmother, and everyone seems to have taken it for granted that she had just gone and got herself a job somewhere else. Until-” he paused and reached for a sandwich-“until rather over a year later a young soldier in a regiment which had moved to the Midlands up and confessed that he had murdered the girl in a fit of jealousy and buried her body on a sandy common. He mentioned pine trees and gorse bushes. Since the whole of the neighbourhood was fairly littered with sandy commons, pine trees, and gorse, it became necessary to take the murderer down there and ask him to indicate the spot. He walked the police over umpteen miles of pinewood and heath, with refreshing intervals when he stood and watched whilst they dug holes in the landscape, and every time they didn’t find a corpse he just said these places were all so much alike, and led them to another spot. They went on for about a fortnight. And then the girl turned up-very sorry and all that, but she had only just seen about it in the papers. She didn’t know the soldier from Adam. She had got fed up with her stepmother and went and got a job in London, and she’d been married for a year and had a baby of two months old.”

Miss Silver said,

“I remember.” And then, “An aunt of mine used to tell the story of a woman who had a very bad husband. He drank, he beat her, and he went after other women. She had to go out charing to support herself and her children-people had very large families in those days. When the youngest child was two years old she felt that she could not bear it any longer. The man came home one night, and he was drunk. There was no sign of his wife or of the children. He went into the bedroom, and there were the children’s seven straw hats perched on the knobs of the big brass bedstead, and a note to say they had gone to Australia. My aunt said they did very well there. The children never saw their father again, but twenty years after, when he was old and ill, the wife came back and nursed him until he died.”

Frank raised a sarcastic eyebrow.

‘’Incredible!”

“She was a good woman, and she considered it to be her duty.”

He set down his cup, and found her regarding him thoughtfully.

“You are concerned about the case of some missing person, Frank?”

He leaned forward and put a log on the fire, which sent up a shower of sparks.

“Oh, not really.”

Miss Silver smiled.

“Are you going to tell me about it?”

“Well, as a matter of fact there isn’t anything to tell. The girl had an unusual name and a pair of unusual eyes, that’s all.”

She leaned sideways and picked up her knitting. The first few rows of what was to be a cardigan for her niece Ethel Burkett were in a deep and particularly pleasing shade of blue.

“Really, that sounds as if it might be interesting.”

He laughed.

“Not a hope! The name is Thomasina, and the eyes are of a quite extraordinarily bright shade of grey, with black lashes and a dark ring round the iris-very arresting. But as for anything else-”

Miss Silver coughed. “Did you say Thomasina?”

He nodded.

“Unusual-isn’t it?”

Miss Silver’s needles clicked.

“And she wants to trace a girl called Anna?”

Frank Abbott stared.

“And who told you that, ma’am? You know, a few hundred years ago you would have been in very serious danger of being indicted for witchcraft.”

“My dear Frank!”

There was a teasing gleam in his eye.

“There are moments when old Lamb isn’t at all sure about it himself. Officially, of course, he doesn’t believe in witches, but I’ve seen him look as if he expected you to fly out of the window on a broomstick.”

Miss Silver rebuked this flippancy.

“I have the highest possible respect for the Chief Inspector, and I hope that the sentiment is to some extent reciprocated.”

“Oh, he respects you all right. But he gets his back up wondering just how the trick is done. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, and the Chief doesn’t like having his eye deceived. He likes to take things decently and in order, with plenty of time to think everything out a step at a time. When you get there in a flash of lightning he begins to suspect the unlawful arts.”

She smiled indulgently.

“When you have finished talking nonsense, Frank, you will perhaps let me tell you that my information about Thomasina and Anna was derived from nothing more supernatural than the Agony Column of the Times. I was struck by the two old-fashioned names, and when you mentioned one of them I naturally remembered the other.”

He laughed.

“Things are always so simple when they have been explained! She did mention that she had put in an advertisement. I didn’t see it myself. What did it say?”

Miss Silver pulled on the large ball which lurked in a knitting bag of gaily flowered chintz.

“ ‘Anna’-that is how it began. And then, I think, ‘Where are you? Do please write.’ And it was signed, ‘Thomasina.’ Perhaps you will now tell me a little more.”

“The names are Anna Ball and Thomasina Elliot. Thomasina is the one with the eyes. Anna sounds as dull as ditchwater, but she has disappeared, and Thomasina wants to find her. When I say disappeared I am quoting Thomasina. She apparently thinks herself responsible because Anna hasn’t any relations. School friendship. Pretty, popular girl taking up the cudgels for dreary, unpopular one. Three years’ intensive post-school letter-writing on Anna’s part. Generous response by Thomasina. A last letter saying Anna was going to a new job and would write when she got there. And then finish. No address. No hint of any destination. Previous jobs, nursery governess for over two years, and companion for one month. No clue as to new job. Might be anything from a housemaid to a henwife- and I rather gather she was likely to be a washout at whatever it was-

He broke off suddenly to enquire, “Why are you looking at me like that? You can’t possibly be interested. I can assure you that nothing can be duller than the whole affair.”

She gave him her charming smile.

“Yet you have introduced the subject with care, and you are quite unable to let it drop.”

He had a half laughing, half rueful expression which took years off his age.

“You always see right through one. The case is dull, and Anna sounds deadly. I keep on telling myself that she has probably just got fed up with writing to Thomasina, or she has taken a huff about something-that sort does. Or she has found herself a young man-which doesn’t sound the least likely, but the oddest specimens do-in which case she wouldn’t have any more use for the girl friend.”

Miss Silver shook her head in a very decided manner.

“Oh, no, it would not have that effect at all. She would be pleased and excited, and her letters to Thomasina would be long and full. It did not happen like that.”

“Then the only possible spark of interest expires.”

“Yet you are interested.”

“I can’t imagine why I should be. There’s nothing to it- just a girl who has stopped writing.”

Miss Silver echoed his words in a very thoughtful manner.

“Just a girl who has stopped writing.”