It was all too much. She felt responsible. The previous evening, Miss Bissell hadn’t helped matters by saying she had ‘no words’, and then spending the next hour and a half managing to find a whole dictionary full of them.
They’d put her in the staff room with a weak tea and a shelf-stacker called Chelsea, who said her mum swore by the medium on the West Pier.
‘They bring them in, don’t they?’ said Chelsea. ‘When someone’s missing. They’re on telly all the time. They give them an item of clothing, and they can smell the missing person and work out where they are.’
‘I thought that was German shepherds?’ said Miss Ambrose.
But she had still found herself wandering down the boardwalk with Mrs Honeyman’s spare cardigan and a packet of Co-op tissues, which is where she finally found Handy Simon holding a bag of cheese and onion crisps.
She glanced at the poster for a coffee morning. ‘I was thinking of having a look through the bric-a-brac,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Handy Simon looked back at the tent. ‘Thought I’d have a laugh, you know.’ He tried to laugh, as evidence, but it didn’t quite make it.
Miss Ambrose held on to Mrs Honeyman’s cardigan. ‘Is she any good, do you think?’
Simon looked back at the tent. ‘I can’t quite make up my mind. She said I shouldn’t worry.’
‘Are you worried?’
‘Perhaps more than I was before someone told me I shouldn’t be,’ said Simon. ‘Are you?’
Miss Ambrose could feel the packet of tissues in her coat pocket. ‘I am, Simon. I keep telling people I’m not, but we’re supposed to be heading back to Cherry Tree tomorrow. What if she’s still missing? We can’t just leave her here.’
‘I could stay behind. If you think it would help?’
Simon’s offer, along with his shabby rucksack and his cheese and onion crisps, somehow made things worse, and Miss Ambrose felt her eyes begin to fill.
‘That’s very kind of you, Simon.’ She took a tissue out of the packet. ‘But I don’t see how it would help.’
‘Are you all right, Miss Ambrose?’
‘It’s the sea air. All the salt,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘It gets me every time.’
Simon offered his arm, and they walked together up the twist of white steps to the crescent and back to the hotel. Past the unfamiliar faces and the crowds of families, all present and unmissing, and slotted neatly into their lives.
FLORENCE
‘It’s that one. Right on the end.’ Jack pointed, with his finger this time, because the taxi couldn’t cope with his walking stick. ‘The one with a cat in the window.’
We’d crawled our way along Church Street. It was a tangle of vehicles and tourists. The traffic came to a standstill outside holiday cottages, where visitors loaded and unloaded their lives and wandered into the road as if they had been gifted with some strange kind of holiday immortality, weaving around cars and annoying the seagulls. People stretched out their afternoons on the wooden benches outside pubs, and spent ice-cream hours sitting on walls, watching the boats, because being away from home means you can let go of the clock. You can eat when you’re hungry. You can sit because your legs are holiday-tired. You can stare at the view, because there isn’t anybody to tell you there are other things to do.
We’d usually stretch out our afternoons as well, but it felt like less of a holiday and more of a game, and I had this funny feeling we were on our last roll of the dice. All through the taxi ride, I could hear Jack breathing through his mouth and Elsie talking to herself. When we finally pulled up outside the address I’m sure the taxi driver felt as relieved as we did.
The house was flat and silent. I could have sworn there was no one at home. It’s odd how you know a house is empty, just by looking at the outside. If there are people in there, it seems to warm a building up. All the laughter and the conversation seems to leak into the bricks. I was wrong, though, because the noise of Jack’s walking stick on the front door had only just stopped ringing in my ears, when there was movement behind the bubbled glass, and the sound of someone turning a key.
‘Local history?’ The woman was so wrinkled, it looked as if her face was trying to fold itself up and disappear. ‘Who exactly are you trying to trace?’
She only opened the door a fraction. I would have been the same, mind you. Three strangers standing on your front step with the most unlikely reason for being there.
Jack explained to her. ‘We’d be so grateful for anything you can tell us,’ he said.
I could see Jack’s charm finding its way into the house. It was a gentle charm. A harmless one. You could imagine what he had been like as a young man. A boy whose eyes creased when he smiled, with slightly stooped shoulders and a good heart. A boy who wasn’t as symmetrical, as obvious, as the others, but a boy who women would remember in years to come, when their lives became ironed out with middle age. A boy they’d wish they had given a chance to.
‘Francis sent us,’ I said. ‘He has very blue eyes.’
The woman’s grip on the door relaxed just a little bit.
‘I suppose you’d better come in, then,’ she said. ‘But don’t be thinking you can con me out of anything. I might be old, but I’m not an idiot.’
Jack smiled. ‘I wouldn’t, dear lady, imagine that for one second.’
And for the first time, she smiled back. ‘You can call me Agnes,’ she said.
The cat was still on the windowsill. It watched us with pencil-point eyes, as we shuffled ourselves around the lounge. It was a fisherman’s cottage and the room was very small. Perhaps because people had smaller lives in those days, and they filled their space up with thoughts and conversation, rather than with sideboards and coffee tables. Agnes didn’t offer us a drink. She told us that in exactly fifteen minutes, her television programme was starting and she had absolutely no intention of missing it, even if the Queen of England happened to knock on the door. She sat in a dining chair, and refused to be swapped, even when Jack stood up and made a big fuss of pointing out the settee.
‘So, who is this man you’re trying to trace?’
We told her what we knew. We left Ronnie out, because he always complicated everything, and there didn’t seem a reason to bring him into it. I did think about it at one stage, but Elsie shot me a look from the other side of the room and it made me change my mind.
‘And why are you so keen to find him?’ As Agnes spoke, the cat leaped from the windowsill and landed on her lap. They’re so clever, cats. They always seem to know exactly where they want to go, and the easiest way to get there.
‘Well?’ said Agnes.
Even Jack’s charm was thrown. ‘We just wanted a chat with him.’ The words stumbled out of his mouth. ‘There’s something we think he could help us with.’
‘Is it about money?’
‘Oh, gracious no. Nothing like that,’ he said.
‘Because if it is, I want no part in it.’
I couldn’t say for definite, but I thought I heard the cat hiss at the back of its throat.
‘I can assure you it’s nothing to do with money.’ Jack cleared his throat. ‘It’s more of a personal matter.’
‘Because there are plenty of people who’d want a word with Gabriel Honeyman about money,’ said Agnes.
‘So you knew him?’ I said.
‘You couldn’t live in Whitby in those days and not know him. Especially around the racetracks.’
‘He was a gambler?’ said Jack.
‘The biggest gambler I’ve ever known.’ Agnes stroked the cat’s head, and it started to knead its claws into her skirt. ‘All the money he made playing that piano, he threw at the horses.’
‘So he was poor?’ I leaned forward. I was in the kind of armchair that seemed to have straw for stuffing, and it felt a bit like sitting on an upholstered hay bale.