It was almost time for lunch, and Hepzie was getting restless. Another little walk might be a good idea. ‘We can just do a quick circuit past the church,’ Thea said.
This meant turning the other way from the earlier walk. The church was very close by, on a high point in a landscape of tremendous undulation. Just past the church gate, the ground fell away in a dramatic sweep down to the ancient pub on the main street. The way the hostelry squatted humbly directly below the grand serenity of the house of God was impossible to ignore. The church was in full light, nothing near it casting a shadow. But the pub gave the impression that it seldom saw any sunshine at all. The ground rose again behind it and large evergreen trees hemmed it in on either side. The facade was plain and dingy, although Thea surmised that this would not remain the case for long. The only place in Chedworth that offered any sustenance to visitors could not be permitted to present a bad image.
She walked with her dog along a short stretch of the village street, passing a row of solid stone houses, many with attic windows projecting from their roofs, and no pavement for pedestrians. Since traffic was rare and slow, this caused very little worry on Thea’s part. She had Hepzie on a lead, but as soon as they turned back up the little street that linked Mrs Wilshire’s house to the main thoroughfare, she untied the dog and let her run free. They had performed a slow and crooked circle, more of a triangle in reality, and were back again within fifteen minutes. In that time, they had encountered not a single person. This was typical, and not at all surprising. There was, indeed, nowhere for people to go in the middle of a Friday. Somewhere towards Lower Chedworth, there was a primary school, sounds of playground games filtering across the valley. A dog barked in the distance and a plane flew overhead. Otherwise, the place was exceedingly quiet.
A quick snack comprising a sandwich made from the bread and ham she had brought from her Witney home, and then she went back upstairs for a look inside the third bedroom. This turned out to be the one Richard must have occupied before leaving home. Despite his assurances that there was nothing left in the house that he wanted for himself, there were possessions here that he had at least neglected to throw away. A guitar hung on the wall, for one thing. An odd home-made instrument, complete with strings, but with no hollow echo chamber, painted in swirly reds and purples. It must have been a short-lived interest – and besides, it would be unlikely to yield a good sound. There were two old transistor radios and a box containing obsolete wires and plugs. All rubbish, Thea assumed. She would have to start a pile for things likely to be destined for the tip.
The last and smallest upstairs room was the most cluttered. It contained old suitcases, a filing cabinet, a broken office chair and a lot of cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling. Stuff that was too big or heavy to go up into the attic, Thea supposed, with a sinking heart. This was turning into a mammoth job, which would take more than a week to fulfil adequately. Professional house clearance people would presumably just bundle the boxes into a skip without checking their contents, along with the suitcases. From the little Richard Wilshire had said, Thea was expected to at least open them all, check for value or interest and then write down what there was. When she set about doing this, she found a few bundles of envelopes obviously containing letters, along with diaries and notebooks, sketchpads and postcards.
It no longer felt like a treasure hunt. When first explained to her, some weeks earlier, it had sounded like something that would be fun. With an interest in history, she had anticipated plenty of fascinating material to browse through. Now, the sheer weight of it all made her feel tired, along with the unease as to the consequences of all this disturbance. A nagging sense of guilt followed her every move. She should have phoned Richard for reassurance, but she kept hoping that his daughter would have found him and said enough to bring him back, without her needing to summon him. She was being more slow and careful than at first, conscious that she might have to put everything back as she’d found it.
At first she had assumed that a handful of old letters and photos would be delightful to examine. Now, with such a quantity of personal paperwork in front of her, she felt mostly sad. There was so much of it, inevitably containing a wealth of detail about the lives of Rita Wilshire and her family. Just one family out of millions, creating this great mass of recorded fact and feeling, which nobody was ever going to care about. Three suitcases and five full boxes was far and away too much for one person to leave behind. There were countless packets of old letters in their original envelopes that had been held together with rubber bands that had now perished, so that the bundles fell apart as soon as she tried to lift them out. They mainly seemed to date back to the 1950s and 60s, many of them typed. Nothing special – just the normal accumulation that anyone could produce, if they were not given to throwing anything away.
When she opened a drawer of the filing cabinet she found dozens of cardboard folders containing newspaper cuttings, recipes, knitting patterns, old theatre programmes, and huge numbers of leaflets and booklets garnered from visits to stately homes, museums, castles, exhibitions and other places of interest. It would appear that for one substantial period of her life, Mrs Wilshire had been an avid traveller, not just in Britain, but France, Italy and Germany too. Everywhere she went, she had gathered up colourful souvenir leaflets and kept them on file in perpetuity. A biographer would be in heaven, tracing her progress around Europe. But there was no biographer, and nobody else could possibly want to know all the places she had been.
Even more dispiriting was the discovery of a lifetime’s worth of diaries. No fewer than twelve five-year diaries, all the same size, most of them secured with a tiny lock, piled in three layers inside the drawer. Sixty years, with a daily record of the weather, people met, films and TV programmes viewed, interspersed with momentous births, marriages and deaths. None of the locks was actually in operation, so it was simple to open them and read their contents. She spent half an hour flitting from 1957 to 1977, then on to 1994 and finally 2010. The writing was legible, and nearly every line in every book had been used. Four lines to a day. A page to a date, so the years came one below the last, and you could easily see what had happened on, say April 10th in 1957, 58, 59, 60 and 61. And very little of note had happened, it seemed. Again, only a dedicated biographer would ever take the trouble to go through it all.
But could you actually dump diaries in a skip? This was a woman’s life, recorded meticulously. While she was still living, it would be essential to have her permission before discarding them. Similarly the hundreds of photos Thea found in one of the boxes, dating back to the monochrome 1950s and beyond. This was a more familiar dilemma to Thea. Just about everybody had a stack of old albums predating the digital age, and almost never looked at them. It was a relief, in most people’s minds, that such albums would soon disappear entirely, leaving far less space-hungry methods of storage for one’s pictures. It hardly seemed worth making a list of all this. She wrote ‘Diaries, letters and photos’ and left it at that.
Time swept by and she had little to show for it. Richard Wilshire would have to get more involved than he apparently wished to, because she, Thea, was not going to make irrevocable decisions for him. When the door knocker sounded at half past three, she and Hepzie exchanged looks of relief from the work that had at some point mutated from fascination into tedium.
Millie Wilshire stood there again, this time without a companion. She looked dazed and uncertain.
‘Hello?’ said Thea.
‘He’s not here, is he? My dad, I mean.’
‘No. Why? Are you still looking for him? It sounds as if you really have lost him.’ It was inappropriately facetious, she realised a second later.
‘Yes, I have. He’s not answering his phone, and nobody’s seen him all day. In fact, I can’t imagine where he’s been since yesterday afternoon. What time did you get here? What time did he leave? Did he say where he was going?’
‘Um …’ said Thea, selecting the question she thought most relevant. ‘It must have been nearly seven o’clock. He said he had a visit to make. Something like that.’
‘What does that mean? Where did he go? This never happens. He’s completely predictable these days, and he always answers his phone, or calls right back. He lives for the phone. People call him all the time for work.’ She fought down her anxiety enough to say more calmly, ‘I thought perhaps you’d called him with a question and he’d popped in because he’s in the area. He’s supposed to be at Yanworth, then Stow, then Chipping Campden. In that order. He had appointments.’
‘I haven’t seen him or spoken on the phone to him. I did think of it after you’d gone this morning, but I decided not to.’ It was impossible to know how concerned to be, but if the man’s daughter was worried, it would seem that there was something wrong. ‘Do you always stay in such close touch?’ she asked.
‘It’s only because we live under the same roof. You do need to know where the other person is. Apart from anything else, there are the dogs. We don’t bother each other much, in the usual run of things. But he has been a bit funny lately, and now he’s vanished, it’s like …’ she tailed off. ‘It scares me that I can’t find him,’ she finished.
‘But you fight a lot? You didn’t agree about your grandmother going into the home.’ A faint hypothesis was developing in Thea’s mind, in which the man was deliberately avoiding the accusing girl, his own guilty feelings already more than enough without her input. ‘Could he have gone to visit her, perhaps?’
Millie blinked in confusion. ‘No, of course not. He has to work. He goes to the home at weekends – or early evening, sometimes.’
‘You know all these farms he visits, do you?’ It seemed highly unlikely that she would. ‘And where did Judith go?’
‘Can I come in if you’re going to ask all these questions?’
‘Sorry. I’m just trying to understand. And you asked me quite a lot, as well. Come on in.’ They went into the front room together, where Millie stood looking intently around herself. Thea was unsure whether she was checking for missing objects or hoping to find her father hiding in a corner.
‘I know which farms he has to visit. He’s got a great big map up on the wall in the flat. I used to go with him sometimes when I was little. I like farms. I’ve got a thing about pigs. Not that you see so many these days. We don’t really talk much any more. Our lives are quite separate. Just lately, we’ve hardly spoken to each other except about meals and that sort of thing.’
‘Because of your gran?’
‘Partly. That’s been a real mess. Her friends have been vile about it. People who never lifted a finger to help now tell him he’s a monster for doing what he’s done.’
‘But he says she wanted to leave. It was her own choice. And I thought you felt much the same as the friends.’
‘It’s not really true that it was her choice. She just couldn’t see any way of avoiding it. Dad stopped fixing up the house like he used to. It was a campaign – that was the word he used himself. A campaign to get her to see her situation the same way he saw it. It upset me every time he talked about it, thinking how miserable she must be about it. He said she’d fall downstairs, or set the place on fire, and then what would people say. She has been very wobbly on her legs. But she could have brought the bed downstairs and used the outside loo. I still think it’s horrible.’
‘Did she care what people said about her?’
Millie nodded. ‘She did, rather. At least, she liked to keep up an independent image.’
‘But you don’t visit her?’
Millie flinched. ‘I’ve been ever so busy. I took her out for lunch one weekend, not so long ago. While she was still living here, that was. And then it all seemed to happen really fast, and Dad got all quiet and withdrawn because of the guilt he was feeling.’
‘But wouldn’t her friends see that at her age a home is really the best place for her?’
‘Some, maybe. Not others. There’s a woman who lives opposite. Norah. She has this sniffy way of showing Gran what she thinks.’
‘I met her today. Just after you were here. She said they’d been friends for thirty years, and she visited her in the home yesterday.’
‘Yeah – I guessed she’d be watching. She always is. I’m surprised she visited, though – nothing better to do, probably. She and Gran email each other mostly. Even when they lived so close, they did it. Gran loves email. Norah and Dad fell out a while ago. She’s been pretty unpleasant to him since then. I don’t think Gran would count her as a friend, exactly. She keeps trying to set her against Dad, which is really stupid.’
‘Has she got a husband?’
‘Not any more.’
Thea was reminded of a house-sit she did in Blockley before she met Drew. There was an old lady with bothersome neighbours there, too. That was also where she’d met the celebrity rapper who had given the most bizarre comments on events going on around him. ‘Where’s Judith?’ she asked again.
Millie frowned. ‘She had to get back to London for something. She stayed the night with me at the flat last night and she and I had lunch today up at Kilkenny. Nice pub, that, by the way. Then the car came for her and she was off.’
‘Car?’
‘Right. Courtesy of the BBC. They all have their own drivers, like royalty. It’s another world.’
‘I suppose it is. She is awfully famous,’ said Thea, thinking that if she recognised the actress, then almost everybody would.
‘She’s nice, though. It hasn’t spoilt her. At least …’
‘I suppose it must have an effect on a person.’
‘It’s mostly the being recognised all the time. People think they know her, and that’s exhausting. There’s never any peace.’
‘Must be complicated for you as well.’
‘I’m a haven from it all. Dad and me, that is. She loves coming to stay with us. She thinks my dad’s perfect. We both think she’s amazing, getting so successful before she’s even twenty-five.’
An unworthy thought flitted across Thea’s mind. Judith was young and pretty; Richard Wilshire was divorced and appeared not to have a woman in his life. Did he harbour fantasies about his daughter’s famous friend? Wouldn’t it be odd if he didn’t? And did Judith have a boyfriend of her own age?
‘Well, I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for him going missing. Did you say you’d been to the farms he was meant to visit?’
‘One of them. He was due in Yanworth at eleven this morning, expecting to be there about two hours. I was thinking he might join us at the pub for lunch. I deliberately chose one that was more or less on his way. So Judith and I waited by the gate from about half twelve. When he didn’t come, I went in to find him. The farmer was in the yard, all his cows assembled and waiting, but Dad had never shown up. The chap was furious. He kept me talking for ages. Said he could see for himself that he’d got at least four reactors. There’s a lump that comes up on the animal’s neck. He hardly needed Dad to tell him. He’d tried Dad’s mobile as well, with no reply. I didn’t know what to say to him. Something must have happened. I should call the police,’ she burst out. ‘I know he wouldn’t let Andrew down like that if he was all right.’
‘Andrew’s the farmer?’
‘Right. He was so angry,’ the girl said miserably. ‘The TB business is so cruel. I don’t know how they bear it. Those poor cows, killed in their prime – and it’s always the farmer’s favourite that has to go.’
It would seem that this young lady was not good at bearing things, Thea thought. A sensitive little flower, evidently. Even perhaps a moral coward. ‘I imagine your dad has to take a fair bit of aggravation when he breaks the bad news,’ she said.
‘And the rest. They’re always yelling at him about it, and how the tests are so inaccurate and there’s no justice. He’s had to get very thick-skinned about it.’
‘Somebody has to do it,’ Thea murmured, not really believing her own words. If nobody would do it, the system would have to change, and that might be a very good thing. ‘Well … I’m not sure what we ought to do now. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve got my instructions, and I’d better press on with the job. It’s up to you whether you contact the police, but as I understand it, they’re unlikely to worry too much about a grown man not answering his phone.’
‘I know,’ Millie said. ‘Especially when he’s done it before.’
‘Pardon?’
‘He went off with no warning five years ago. It was dreadful. He came back three months later and never said where he’d been. It ruined the marriage with my mum. Well – you can understand it, can’t you? She was sure he’d been away with another woman, and he would never persuade her otherwise.’
Thea was lost for words. That ordinary, stiff-backed man had some kind of secret life, then. Other implications dawned on her, thanks to this astonishing piece of family history. No wonder Millie got agitated when he went off without saying where he was going. No wonder she was such a clingy daughter, well into her twenties. Because despite her protestations, she was clearly panicking at his unexpected absence.
‘You said he was completely predictable now? And yet …?’ she left the question hanging.
‘I know – it sounds silly, doesn’t it. But this time I know it’s different,’ Millie insisted. ‘This time, I’m sure something awful’s happened to him.’