“That explains the fact that she was terrified of me,” Alex said. From the corner of my eye, I saw him glance at me. “It’s a theory you yourself held not too long ago. I take it my manly charms have made you change your mind?”
I turned the map over. “There is that,” I admitted. “However, there is also the fact that Miss Jennings lives in a cottage I see no way she could have paid for. And the fact that the man’s shirt she was ironing had pin marks in the left sleeve.”
“So you noticed that, too,” Alex said. “David Wilde. Whom she has no recollection of seeing that day.”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go to Torbram and see what Alice Sanders has to say.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
By the time we drove into Torbram, it was late afternoon and the sky was lowering, the clouds threatening a downpour. We had been spattered with intermittent rain throughout the drive, which had slowed us down. Now we faced the prospect of finding Alice Sanders as early night fell and brought a storm with it from the sea.
We started at an inn, where Alex parked the motorcar, hired us a room for the night, and asked the innkeeper if he was familiar with the Sanderses. As a Londoner, I thought this method of finding someone absurd, but Alex assured me that in a place as small as Torbram, it would work.
He was correct. Torbram was larger than Anningley, with a snappier High Street and a lovely seaside walk along the south coast overlooking the ocean, as well as winding neighborhoods of pretty homes, but it was still a small town. The innkeeper did not know the Sanderses, but his wife had heard of them, and the girl working in the kitchen knew that Alice Sanders served tables at one of the local pubs. Alex and I followed a network of local hearsay, and eventually we made the journey along the seaside under the threatening sky to the place where we’d heard Alice Sanders was waiting tables.
The pub was called The Red-Haired Queen, and it was nestled on the end of the seaside strip, its battered old beams looking out over the cold, dark, rocky beach and the tossing surf beyond. Around the curve of the shoreline, I could faintly see the outline of a lighthouse through the clouds, and I imagined on a clear day I’d be able to see all the way to Cornwall.
The taproom was doing brisk business, many of the men from town huddled over their drinks, happy to get out of the windy cold and sit by the fireplace, where a blaze had been lit. I pulled off my gloves as Alex took my arm and led me to the large, scarred bar and helped me onto a stool.
He ordered us each a beer, making sure to request the dark bitter I liked, then turned and gave me a shrug. “It’s been a long day, and I think we’ll need it.”
“I agree,” I said.
He did not take a seat, but leaned on the bar next to me, gracefully propped on one elbow. He removed his hat and ran a hand quickly through his hair. “I’m not entirely sure how to go about this,” he said. “I don’t want to be too obvious.”
“I don’t think she’s in the room,” I told him, sipping the beer that the bartender had slid in front of me. “There’s only one serving woman here, and she’s past forty. Too old to be the wife of a man of army age.”
“Perhaps George Sanders married an older woman,” Alex said, though I could tell he agreed with me.
“Unlikely,” I replied calmly. “Did you find it strange that the innkeeper’s wife knew who the Sanderses were but not that George Sanders has disappeared?”
Alex sipped his own beer, his gaze seeming to rest on me, though I knew there was no detail of the room around us that he’d missed. “Either she hasn’t told anyone, or George Sanders was the kind of man no one cares to ask after.”
I ran a thumb up the side of my glass. “Or a combination of both. It’s possible she hasn’t been very vocal about it,” I said. “People may think he left her.”
He gave me a long look. “Would that also be why she hasn’t reported his disappearance to the police?”
“Perhaps she has,” I replied. “But the police would assume a man like that simply walked away by choice, that she must have done something to provoke him. Women don’t have a great many choices in such situations.”
He looked uncomfortable and a little sad. “I tried to leave you taken care of until I got back, you know. Instead I left you in a hell of a mess.”
I looked up at him. “It’s over,” I said. “And I think Alice Sanders just came into the room.”
A woman had just entered through the door from the kitchen, carrying two bowls of soup. She was thirtyish, rounded and ruddy, her brown hair tied up under a scarf. She could have been any woman in England, except for the bruised pouches of skin beneath her eyes that betrayed sleeplessness. She set down the soup bowls at a table with barely a glance at her customers, then turned away. I thought I might recognize her figure as the one I’d seen leaving our terrace, but I couldn’t be sure.
The woman walked past us, and Alex said softly, “Madam, I beg your pardon.”