Wings over the Watcher (5 page)

She studied Arthur Pennington’s face and read puzzlement in there. Nothing but puzzlement. No grief or guilt, no anger or jealousy. Only complete confusion. He simply didn’t understand where his wife was. Once again she felt the unexpected wash of pity.

“You were kind enough to give me some suggestions this morning,” he began. “I haven’t been to work today, you know. I just couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to
concentrate. I mean where
is
she?”

“I’m sure she’s all right.”

He turned on her. “How can you know that for certain?”

“I don’t know it for certain,” Joanna replied coldly, “but I know the statistics indicate that most women of this age who ‘go missing’ have,” (
gone off with a lover, whispered her voice
) “not come to any harm. They are perfectly safe. The best thing you can do is to be patient and wait.”

He opened his mouth, fish-like, to speak, shut it again without saying anything. But his eyes bulged with the effort.

“Mr Pennington, I feel I should remind you. Your wife is a grown woman. Old enough to make her own decisions. If she hasn’t got in touch with you it might well be because she doesn’t want you to know where she is. Give her some space.”

He blinked. Looked still more upset, his face collapsing in on itself so he suddenly looked like a very old, wizened man. He was patently telling the truth when he claimed that he hadn’t slept last night.

“I don’t know where to start,” he said, almost tearful now.

Another emotion washed over Joanna – just as unexpected as the others. Anger against Beatrice, this heartless woman who had abandoned this vulnerable man once she had grown some self-confidence.

Be business-like
, she thought. You were confided in in confidence. You cannot tell what you know but you can help this man in other ways. Give him something to do.

“What about her car?” Joanna prompted.

“It’s in the garage. I checked. She didn’t like driving. Preferred to walk or use her bike. We’re only a little way out of the town centre. It’s funny really.” He was beginning to relax. “It wasn’t so much the driving that bothered her. She said she could never find anywhere to park.”

Joanna smirked. Neither could she.

“So she used her bike to go to work. It’s still there, outside
the library, locked to the railings. So she
arrived
safely. But she never went inside. I’ve asked her colleagues. No one saw her that morning. So she must have got all the way to work, locked her bike and then walked off somewhere. It’s extraordinary. Why would she do that?” His face was a perfect mash of astonishment and grief.

Joanna was silent.

“And I’ve checked our bank account too. Like you advised. There’s no money missing. Not a penny. She hasn’t withdrawn any from the cashpoint since last week – just before the weekend. And that was only for a bit of shopping up the High Street. Bits and pieces, you know. She wouldn’t have had much on her. Twenty, thirty pounds. No more.”

Maybe her lover has enough for both of them. Or maybe she’s been salting away some of the housekeeping money each week in preparation for the great day when she would cast off her shackles.

Arthur Pennington consulted a tick-list in a tiny notebook he had kept stowed away in his jacket pocket. “Her passport’s in our holiday drawer and I can’t see that there’s clothes or a suitcase missing. She’s just vanished, Miss Piercy.”

“Have you spoken to…?”

“I’ve rung every single friend in our personal phone book and drawn a complete blank.”

So Romeo wasn’t in this personal phone book. This secret lover was not a mutual friend.

“And your children?”

“There’s no getting hold of our son, Graham. He’s out on the rigs somewhere. There’s no answer at his flat and his mobile’s switched off – or at least there’s no signal. And Fiona says she hasn’t heard from her mother for months. I’m at my wits’ end, I can tell you. I don’t know where to turn. Where to start looking. It isn’t possible for a human being to disappear. She must
be
somewhere. But where? Living another life? I’d say it is impossible. I can’t believe it
of Beatrice. And there’s something else.”

He leaned to one side, picked something up from the floor.

She hadn’t noticed him carrying a pink carrier bag. She did now when he picked it up.
Ann Summers
. In fancy, scrawly writing. She read the name on the side, looked at the man sitting opposite her and wondered what on earth was coming next.

He put the bag between them on the desk. “Look inside it,” he invited.

It was the usual stuff, a black basque, black, lace-sided knickers with pretty red bows, holdup stockings. A black chiffon negligee which would have reached somewhere halfway up Beatrice’s plump thighs.

Pennington still looked puzzled. “I’ve never seen her wearing anything like
this
.”

He hadn’t made any conclusions about this merchandise. Certainly not the obvious one.

To give her time to think Joanna fingered the flimsy garments and pictured Beatrice, stout, short, red-faced, puffing her way up a hill, hair greying, roots overdue for retouching, cellulite all the way up her legs, stomach overhanging her cycling shorts. Joanna smiled to herself. Love had many guises. For a brief moment she savoured the image of Beatrice Pennington squeezing into these for her secret lover. And the secret lover adoring her in return.

Then she looked back at Arthur and felt how unfair it was. He was puzzled, distraught. Heartbroken.
The soul had gone out of the man.

Something in her died. She knew Matthew’s face would not look like this if she had disappeared for one night. And now he never would. She could picture him all too clearly as he had looked on the night before he had left. Chin firm, gaze clear, a certain hardness around the mouth.

“The tickets are still on these scraps of material,” Pennington continued. “She never has worn them. They’re new. All new. And considering what material’s in them
bloody expensive too.”

A little anger was seeping in fed by his native meanness. He was beginning to suspect something. Joanna was learning something now about Arthur Pennington that only his wife had known. A certain petulance that he would not want
her
to recognise. His wife disappearing might break his heart but it was the wasting money which was the greater sin. The one he would probably never be able to forgive. Mentally she shook her head. We all have an ugly side to us.

She ran her finger along the sharp edge of the new lace on the knicker-leg. And felt a new emotion. For the first time since she had heard of Beatrice’s disappearance she was very slightly concerned.

These were obviously clothes she had bought to take with her, to wear with her secret lover in nights of passion.
So why had she left them behind?

In the excitement and tension of the final walk-out had it been an oversight?

It was possible. But these had been very deliberate and expensive purchases and Beatrice Pennington had struck her as a very careful woman – apart from this one, huge impulse – her plan to vanish. Joanna was surprised that she had forgotten this vital ingredient for her Karma Sutra.

Her eyes sharpened as she studied them. Had this really been an oversight?

Or had Beatrice been a different sort of woman? Malicious? Had this possibly been a deliberate gesture? Some little clue for her husband to find and work out where his wife had gone? A poke in the eye for the man she was to abandon without a backwards glance or one single word of explanation or apology?

She jerked her head upwards to find Arthur Pennington waiting for her to speak, his pale eyes, behind the glasses, drooped and sad but fixed on her face with the vaguest glimmer of hope. That Detective Piercy would find his wife and bring her home again.

Joanna felt she must perform. “Your wife didn’t leave you a note, did she?”

“No.” Said indignantly. “I’d have told you. I wouldn’t have kept that from you. I know how important these things are.”

Then it was time to take the bull by the horns. “Your wife. I mean – Beatrice…” She was aware she must tread very carefully.
Tiptoe through the tulips
. “There isn’t any possibility that your wife has gone away
with
someone, is there?”

The scraps of scarlet and black lace and chiffon lay between them, almost obscenely, on the desk.

Pennington didn’t even stop to consider. “Don’t be ridiculous.” He rejected the idea out of hand. “That’s a stupid suggestion. My wife is a
moral
woman. I’d have thought you’d have realised that. Have a lover, you mean?” He tried to laugh. But really he was seething at the suggestion. He began to lecture her. “Inspector. I know it’s all the rage now to go on and on about these things but sex. A lover. Well – it doesn’t play a big part in our lives. We’re far too busy getting on with things. I’d suspect the Pope of having a lover before my Beatrice.”

Joanna opened her mouth, clamped it shut again, realised the Pope quip had been an attempt at a joke, smiled and felt a terrible pang of anxiety.

Arthur Pennington was due for a very big shock.

His forehead was shiny with sweat. He mopped it with a hanky he drew from his pocket. An old-fashioned, man’s cotton handkerchief, starched, pressed and ironed. All this registered and made her slightly uneasier. She was going to have to play this one strictly by the book, gather all the evidence and confront him with it. Otherwise Arthur Pennington was the sort of man who would virtually camp outside Leek Police Station. He would believe nothing bad about his wife unless she could confront him with her whereabouts. For her to simply disappear was not going to be an option. There was a steeliness about his face, a mulish
stubbornness too. “OK,” she said finally. “I need to know a few more details about your wife.”

And then the petty side of Pennington peeped out again as he mocked her. “What is there to tell? What do you want to know? How often she takes a bath? None of that’ll find her.” Then he lost it. “Oh, none of this makes any sense.” He passed his hand across his brow, wiped the moisture off this time on his trousers as though his standards were slowly slipping.

“Where does she work?”

“In the library.” He frowned. “I already told you. She’s an assistant there. No one there knows a thing. I’ve been and asked them. I’ve virtually done my own investigation. More than you have, anyway.”

Anyone who deals with the general public, particularly when they are labelled a
servant of the people
, is on the receiving end of their scorn. They are paying for you. They dish out
your
wages. There was something belligerent about Pennington now. This was going to be hard work with no reward.

“And what does she do in her spare time?”

“Not a lot, Inspector. A bit of gardening, keeps the house, shopping. She reads a lot of books. That’s why she went to work in the library in the first place. She has a fondness for reading. She started up a Readers’ Group there. It’s been going a few years now.”

Joanna felt the faintest of tingles in her toes. Readers’ Groups sounded fertile feeding ground for a romantic entanglement.

She would find him there. Some quiet, shy man, who loved to dream of romance through the pages of a book.

“We lead a quiet, organised sort of life,” Pennington said with pride.

On the surface, maybe, Mr Pennington. But underneath? I suspect otherwise.

Keep mum.

“And what do you do?”

He showed his impatience then. “What has that got to do with it? I work as an accountant. But knowing that won’t help you. This is nothing to do with either of our jobs.”

“Does she have any brothers and sisters?”

“One sister, Frances. She’s a widow. She and Beatrice were fairly close. Not very, you understand, but I thought she might have some idea.”
Again he looked acutely lost – bereft.
Then he shook himself so the shoulders of his jacket puckered and smoothed. “But I’ve already rung her. She doesn’t know where Beatrice is.”

The little worm of suspicion bored its way through Joanna’s mind again. Sworn to secrecy? Or truly ignorant?

“And her parents?”

“They’re retired farmers. They’re both in their eighties. They live near Brown Edge now, in a smallholding.” For the first time she saw Arthur Pennington smile. It was a nice smile. He had good teeth and it was wide and looked genuine. He looked a
nice
man. As had his wife. “They’re meant to be retired but they can’t be without a few pigs and a couple of sheep. It wouldn’t feel right to them, you understand. But I’ve spoke to all the family this morning. They haven’t heard a word from Beatrice for months. I tell you. We live a quiet life.”

Not that quiet. Somehow, somewhere, in this quiet life, she has met a lover.

“Friends?”

“Apart from the people at the library and, I suppose the other folk in the Readers’ Group, she has really just the two close friends that live in the town.” He gave another of his surprisingly sweet smiles. “Been pals since schooldays. Close as skin they are. Once in a blue moon they go out for a bite to eat up the town and I suppose a bit of a gossip.”

“I shall need their names.”

“I’ve phoned them too. They know nowt.”

“I’ll talk to them anyway.”

“All right then. Marilyn Saunders. She trained as a nurse. Works up in the Cottage Hospital. Nights. And Jewel
Pirtek.”

“Jewel? That’s an unusual name.”

“Changed it herself, by deed poll,” Pennington said in disgust. “Has a Fancy Goods shop halfway up Derby Street.”

Joanna took their addresses and telephone numbers, noting that Arthur Pennington had already methodically prepared a list which he handed to her with resignation. Typewritten. As the day clicked by he must be coming to terms that his wife had, wilfully, abandoned him. And he expected
her
to investigate. He had thought no further than this. Certainly he had not considered the consequences. She had better not let him down.

“One last thing, Mr Pennington, does your wife carry a mobile phone?”