—
“Back again, sir?” the desk sergeant said affably. Ah, thought Frobisher, he has had his revenge on me for the burnt bacon by sending me on a wild goose chase. Frobisher did not give the sergeant the satisfaction of seeing his frustration at the morning’s futility; instead he said, rather sharply, “Get someone to fetch me Constable Cobb, will you, Sergeant? I have a special task for him.”
In Haste
“A note came for you,” Mrs. Bodley said, approaching Gwendolen in full sail as she took her seat for dinner.
“A note? Delivered by a good-looking man?” she hazarded.
“No. A policeman, in uniform,” Mrs. Bodley said disapprovingly as she handed it over. “Miss G. Kelling” was written in a bold hand on the envelope. Gwendolen waited until a lingering Mrs. Bodley, overcome with intrigue, left before opening the envelope. Dear Miss Kelling, could you please ask your friend to find out if either of your girls wore a locket? Thank you. Yours sincerely, John Frobisher.
So his name was John.
She knew nothing of his circumstances. Perhaps he was married, although he didn’t seem the uxorious sort, he seemed so very wifeless. Of course, he knew nothing about her circumstances either, nothing of her unexpected wealth. She hadn’t disabused him of the Library. It seemed to be a source of comfort for him. She supposed librarians rarely disturbed the status quo of a man’s heart.
It took a moment or two to digest Frobisher’s request, she had been waylaid by the revelation of the “John.” Her heart sank when she realized the implication. She knew what it meant. He had found a body. A soldier from the battlefield could be identified by his dog tags. A girl found in London could be identified by a locket.
She had, of course, presumed that Freda and Florence were alive and well somewhere. It had never even crossed her mind that it might be otherwise, but Frobisher’s query about the locket hinted at a dreadful fate. And if not for Freda and Florence, then for some other poor girl. She felt horribly contrite, she had been treating London as a jaunt while the sober-minded Frobisher had his mind on corpses. How dreadful it would be if either Freda or Florence turned up dead. She could not imagine passing that news on to Freda’s sister.
Cissy Murgatroyd had been Gwendolen’s closest friend, they had travelled through their girlhood together and volunteered to nurse at the Front together, signing up for Red Cross training when they were barely out of school uniform and shipped out to the Front in 1915. The Armistice had parted them. Cissy returned home when peace was declared, but Gwendolen carried on the fight until she was discharged in 1919. When Gwendolen came home, it was to find Cissy married to a civil engineer and already embarked on her first baby.
The man she married was called Wilfred and he was a good sort, with a cheerful, affectionate disposition. If a woman must wed, then she could do worse than Wilfred. (“Oh, Gwen, do marry him yourself if I die before my time!” Cissy said, absurdly delighted by this idea.) But Gwendolen was looking for neither husband nor child, and the one seemed to be the inevitable consequence of the other. (Must loving a man necessitate motherhood? Could you not have one without the other? “Tricky,” Cissy laughed.) It was hardly a problem anyway as there were no men to be found, even if she wanted one—the war had seen to that. If she wished to be loved, she could get a dog. If she craved a child, she could adopt an orphan, Lord knows, there were plenty of them to be had, although she doubted that she had the nerve for motherhood.
“I think you have the nerve for anything, Gwen,” Cissy said. “Even love.”
“Pah,” Gwendolen said eloquently. She would not be beguiled by romantic notions, no matter how well intentioned. Nor would she be constrained by marriage, no matter how cheerful and affectionate the man by her side.
An image of Frobisher, sober and upright at his desk, came into Gwendolen’s mind. What kind of husband would he make? She couldn’t imagine him mucking in with nappy-changing and potato-peeling the way that Wilfred did. The idea made her laugh. He was on a mission, of course, and men on missions had little time for fripperies. He had been sent to Bow Street to “clean the house.” Corruption. It was everywhere, even Miss Shaw at the Library could be bribed out of issuing a fine for an overdue book with a boiled sweet.
* * *
—
At Cissy’s suggestion, she had gone to see Florence’s parents before leaving for London. Mrs. Ingram had fussed about, laying out coffee and biscuits in the drawing room. She was the tremulous sort, the cups and saucers rattled, the coffee-pot wobbled in her hand until Mr. Ingram said gently, “Sit down, Ruthie, let me do that.”
“We tried,” Mr. Ingram told Gwendolen. “We contacted Scotland Yard, they gave us the name of a detective—Frobisher—they said he was the person to talk to—but he never got in touch with us. We’ve tried many times.”
“She was led astray by that minx,” Mrs. Ingram interjected.
“Freda?”
“Her mother’s a slattern.” It was an unexpected word on the lips of someone so genteel. Mrs. Ingram kept putting her hand to her throat as if feeling for an invisible rope of pearls. “And a thief, too.”
“Freda?”
“We welcomed a serpent into the bosom of our family and now Florence is probably lying dead in an alleyway somewhere,” she moaned.
“Now, now, Ruthie, we know that she’s alive,” Mr. Ingram said.
How was he so sure?, Gwendolen wondered. In answer, Mr. Ingram had pulled open a drawer in the dresser and taken out a little stack of picture postcards that he passed to Gwendolen. “She writes,” he said, “as if she were on her holidays.” Mrs. Ingram groaned and was afforded another “Now, now, Ruthie.”
Gwendolen studied the postcards. None of them had a helpful return address written on the back. The postcards looked as though they had been torn off a larger strip and indeed they were all marked “The Sights of London”—St. Paul’s, Big Ben and so on. “Dear Mummy and Daddy,” Gwendolen read aloud, “I’m having a lovely time in London. Miss you!” Mrs. Ingram looked as though she was going to be sick.
“You see,” Mr. Ingram said, “the last postmark is only two days ago. She’s fine.”
“She’s backward, Alistair,” Mrs. Ingram wailed. “Retarded! She can’t look after herself.” Mr. Ingram heaved a great sigh and said, “Just ‘slow,’ Ruthie, that’s all. Florrie’s a little slow.” He sighed heavily again. “The policeman I spoke to in Scotland Yard said that girls go missing all the time in London.” Mrs. Ingram howled. “I would have gone down to look for her myself,” Mr. Ingram said, “but I couldn’t leave poor Ruthie—her nerves have always been very frayed, you know.”
Gwendolen had known men in the war whose nerves had not just been frayed but shredded by the abominations they had witnessed. Mrs. Ingram could not compete in those stakes, yet her sobs were awful and Gwendolen berated herself for the flint in her soul; the woman deserved compassion.
“We thought about perhaps employing a private detective,” Mr. Ingram said.
“Gladys Murgatroyd is useless,” Mrs. Ingram said bitterly. “I do believe she doesn’t care if she never sees her daughter again.”
“I’m going to London,” Gwendolen reassured Mrs. Ingram. “I’m going to look for them. I’m going to find them.” A shepherdess, she thought, looking for the lost lambs. Although you wouldn’t really call Freda a lamb, more of a black sheep if anything.
As she walked back down the drive of the Ingrams’ house, Gwendolen thought she could hear Mrs. Ingram’s lamentations still ululating in the air.
“I promise,” she had said, “that I’ll bring Florence home to you.” She had created a hostage to fortune, hadn’t she? Beware of promises, she thought. What if the daughter she returned to the Ingrams was no longer living? It didn’t bear thinking about.
* * *