‘I want to know why you didn’t tell me that, before Linda disappeared, she’d packed a canvas travelling bag – which apparently has also disappeared?’

  Mrs Corbet laughs. I think she is trying to sound amused, but to me it comes across as close to hysterical.

  ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ she says. ‘If Linda had been packing a bag to take away with her, she’d never have put those clothes in it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The missing clothing is either old or else stuff that’s gone completely out of fashion. Linda wouldn’t be seen dead wearing …’

  She stops, horrified at what she’s just started to say.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ she moans, as she presses her knuckles hard against her teeth. ‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod …’

  She’s gone bright red, and I’m afraid that if she carries on like this, she’ll have a seizure. I drop the money on the coffee table, and grab her firmly by the shoulders.

  ‘Take deep, slow breaths, Mary,’ I order her. ‘Like this … in, out … in, out … in, out …’

  She does as she’s been told, and slowly the red colouring drains away, and she’s pretty much back to normal.

  I ease her into one of the armchairs.

  ‘Stay there,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to the kitchen to make you a cup of hot, sweet tea.’

  ‘I’ll make the tea,’ she says, trying to get up out of the chair.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ I insist, gently forcing her back again.

  ‘But you don’t even know where the kitchen is,’ she protests.

  ‘There can’t be that many rooms on the ground floor,’ I say. ‘I expect I’ll find it eventually.’

  The kitchen is clean, tidy and organized. I wonder to what extent this is due to Mary’s own inclinations, and to what extent she, like the root vegetables on the allotment, has had order imposed on her.

  When I return to the lounge – one cup of hot sweet tea in hand – Mary is looking a little better.

  ‘While I’ve been sitting here, I think I’ve managed to work it out,’ she says in a calm, reasoned voice.

  ‘Work what out?’

  ‘Work out what happened to those missing clothes you talked about. Linda was such a responsible girl, and when she realized she was never going to wear any of the clothes again, she will have bundled them all up into a bag, and taken them down to one of the charity shops.’

  She is consistent in only talking about Linda in the past tense, I note. Mary is convinced her daughter is dead, and nothing but cold hard evidence is going to make her think otherwise.

  ‘Do you think she would have left Mr Dumpy at the charity shop, as well?’ I ask.

  Mary Corbet looks as if I’ve just slapped her.

  ‘How … how do you know about Mr Dumpy?’ she gasps. Then she nods. ‘I know who told you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’ve been talking to my husband,’ she says – and makes it sound like an accusation.

  ‘Of course I’ve been talking to him,’ I agree. ‘You must surely have known I was going to do that.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go listening to him, you know,’ she tells me. ‘He’s got it all wrong.’

  Or, to put it another way, I think, he refuses to buy into your version of events.

  ‘So what did happen to Mr Dumpy?’ I persist. ‘She won’t have left it in the charity shop, now will she?’

  ‘She might have done,’ Mary says, her voice that of a stubborn child who knows the game is up, but is still looking for a miracle to save her.

  ‘Your husband told me that she took that bag everywhere with her – that she insisted on using it, even though you bought her a smart new suitcase.’

  ‘It used to be like that, but she’d finally grown out of it,’ Mary Corbet says. ‘She told me so herself.’

  ‘Can you remember her exact words?’

  ‘Not exact, no, but it was something like, “I’ve grown tired of this old bag and I think I’ll throw it out.”’

  She’s lying – but I’m not sure that she actually knows she’s lying. I think there’s at least a part of her brain which is processing all the material to make it fit her theory. It’s something we’re all guilty of, though most of us don’t do it on quite this grand scale.

  I decide to approach the problem from a different angle.

  ‘What did Linda do with the money she earned in her part-time job at the pharmacy?’ I ask. ‘Did she put it into her bank account, or did she give it to you for safe keeping?’

  I realize I have just made a mistake. Questions should be open-ended, so that they harvest as much information as possible. What I’ve just done is not so much to ask her a question as to present her with two of my own assumptions and ask her to pick one.

  It’s all her bloody fault, I tell myself – she’s making me lose all sense of judgement.

  ‘Linda kept all the money that she earned from her job in her bedroom,’ Mary Corbet says.

  ‘She’s been working at the pharmacy since she turned sixteen. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she’s worked there every Saturday and for a lot of every school holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So even though she won’t have been paid as much as a grown-up would have been, it must still be a fair amount of cash.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And didn’t it worry you that Linda kept so much money in the house, Mary?’

  ‘It did, at first – but then she showed me her hiding place, and I had to admit that as long as she kept it there, it was perfectly safe.’

  ‘A good burglar can find anything,’ I say.

  ‘A burglar, on average, is in a house from somewhere between ninety seconds and three minutes. He only has time to check out the most obvious hiding places – and Linda’s was not obvious.’

  Ah yes, I mustn’t forget that her husband’s a copper who probably lives and breathes criminology, even when he’s at home.

  ‘I’d like to see Linda’s room,’ I say.

  ‘Why?’ Mary asks, defensively aggressive.

  ‘Because it’s possible that it may contain some clue as to what’s happened to her.’

  ‘Well, if you think it will help,’ Mary says.

  She is suddenly much more relaxed. And no wonder – because she’s getting exactly what she wanted.

  You’re an idiot, I tell myself – you came here with the sole purpose of making it clear to her that you want nothing more to do with the case, and yet you’re allowing yourself to get sucked in even further.

  But now, having made the request, I feel obliged, for politeness’ sake, to at least go through the motions.

  Linda’s bedroom could have been lifted straight out of the Ideal Homes Exhibition (Children and teenager’s Section) of 1973. The pale-wood wardrobe, chest of drawers, bookcase and dressing table are a matched set with clean functional lines – modern furniture for the modern young lady. The room also contains a desk with a flexible desk lamp and an office chair – a reminder, if we needed one, that this is not just a bedroom, it is also a study.

  A small teddy bear – ears ragged, black cotton thread smile worn pencil thin – sits at one corner of the desk. He is quite cute – though nowhere near as cute as ReadyTeddy, who keeps my bed warm for me when I am not there.

  One thing does surprise me about the room – the choice of posters that the girl has chosen to Blu-Tack to the wall. I might have expected pictures of Mud and Suzi Quatro, or – if she had already put her teenybopper tastes in music behind her – Cockney Rebel and Eric Clapton. Instead, there are engravings of men in seventeenth-century garb. I recognize two of them immediately – George Herbert and John Donne, both of them giants of the Metaphysical movement (which wasn’t really a movement at all, but we won’t get into that now). The third just might be Sir John Sucking, a minor Metaphysical poet who stands in relation to Donne and Herbert in much the same way as Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers) stands in relation to John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

  ‘Had Linda been studying the Metaphysical poets at school?’ I ask.

  Mary Corbet shrugs. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that. She’d long ago got beyond the stage where I could understand what she was studying. If you want to know the answer, you’ll have to ask her dad. She always talked about her school work to him.’

  Would that be the dad that – just five minutes ago – she told me I shouldn’t listen to?

  This is one mixed-up lady.

  On the chair beside the dressing table there’s a white girl’s blouse and a sewing box. I pick up the blouse, and see that Linda has started to embroider something on the back of it: ‘And dare you face your urges’.

  ‘She was always good at embroidery,’ Mary Corbet says. ‘She won prizes for it at junior school.’

  ‘Does this phrase mean anything to you?’ I ask, holding up the blouse for her to see.

  ‘Is it Shakespeare?’ Mary Corbet asks. ‘I know she had a big thing for Shakespeare at one time.’

  No, it isn’t Shakespeare, or rather – taking into account the fact that the Bard of Avon wrote so much that only someone with a really big head would claim to know it all – I don’t think it’s Shakespeare.

  I spot the clue (I am a detective, after all) on Linda’s desk. It takes the form of a single sheet of A4.

  ‘Is this Linda’s handwriting?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Mary Corbet replies, with a catch in her throat.

  What’s written on the piece of paper is part of a poem.

  And dare you face your urges and desires

  Embracing both the good and bad you own

  Or will you, like a cold and errant coward

  Abandon all and make a shivering turn?

  Robert Cudlip 1612–1659

  By the date, another of the Metaphysicals, though not one I have ever heard of.

  It occurs to me that I’ve almost forgotten one of the main reasons I came up here.

  ‘Where did Linda hide the money that she’d earned at the pharmacy?’ I ask.

  ‘You don’t want to bother about that now,’ Mary Corbet says, with a definite hint of uneasiness in her voice.

  ‘But I do want to bother,’ I insist. ‘And if you want me to be your investigator, then you’re going to have to allow me to investigate in any way I consider appropriate.’

  She points to the bookshelf. ‘It’s in there. She hollowed out one of those books.’

  I’m impressed by Linda’s collection. There’s Shakespeare, though almost every bookshelf in the world will have Shakespeare (even if most of them go unread), but there’s also Ibsen, Chekhov and Aristophanes. She has a number of Dickens’ novels, but these are supplemented by Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Proust. This collection is not exactly a mirror version of my own, but the two certainly strongly overlap.

  I notice two other things: the first is that the only science books on the shelves seem to be school textbooks, and the second is that there’s a copy of Enid Blyton’s Five Go To Smuggler’s Top incongruously sandwiched between George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Jane Austen’s Emma.

  ‘Which book is it that she hollowed out?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Mrs Corbet says.

  She’s lying, of course. And the reason she’s decided to lie is because she’s starting to realize that she’s made a serious tactical error in bringing me up here – an error that could seriously damage her campaign to get me to accept her version of what happened to Linda, rather than her husband’s.

  It doesn’t matter that she’s lying, because I don’t need her help. I already know which one is the hollowed-out book – it’s the one that simply doesn’t belong on these particular shelves.

  I reach out for Five Go To Smuggler’s Top.

  ‘What’s the point in looking for the money Linda saved up?’ Mary Corbet asks, verging on the desperate now. ‘It won’t give you any clues about what happened to her.’

  No, it won’t – not if it’s still there, snugly concealed in its hiding place.

  I flick the book open. It has indeed been carefully hollowed out – and it’s empty.

  ‘Maybe she moved it somewhere else,’ Mary Corbet says.

  ‘Now why would she have done that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she’d decided it just wasn’t safe leaving it there any more.’

  ‘And what might have led her to the conclusion that it wasn’t safe where it was? Could she perhaps have seen a number of suspicious-looking characters lurking around her bookcase?’

  ‘It’s not funny!’ Mary Corbet says.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to be funny,’ I tell her. ‘I was just trying to show you how absurd your explanation is. Let’s face it, Mary – she took her clothes, and she took her money. She’s run away.’

  ‘Linda wouldn’t do that,’ Mary says. ‘She’d have been going to university next year – and she was so excited about it. And even if she had run away – and she’d no reason to in this world – she’d have found some way to contact me, so I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘I have to go,’ I say, heading for the door.

  She moves quickly, to block my way.

  ‘If she’d run away, she’d have been sure to take Theodore Bear with her,’ Mary says. ‘And where’s her school uniform? Why would she have taken that with her?’

  ‘When was the last time she wore it?’

  ‘The night she went round to Janet’s house …’ She pauses. ‘The night she was supposed to go round to Janet’s house,’ she corrects herself. ‘The night that she went missing.’ She takes another pause – this time for breath. ‘So how do you explain that, Miss Redhead? How do you explain the fact that Theodore Bear is still here – and her school uniform isn’t?’

  I can’t explain, but though those two things provide some slight counterweight to the theory that Linda has run away, they are nowhere near heavy enough to tip the scale in the opposite direction.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary …’ I say.

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, because I was afraid you might think I’d gone a bit mad, but I went to see a medium last night.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Mary!’ I groan.

  ‘You shouldn’t mock mediums, Miss Redhead. The police use them all the time.’

  ‘No, they don’t. They very occasionally listen to what mediums have to say, but usually, when the truth is uncovered, it’s a million miles from what the medium told them.’

  ‘I … I spoke to Linda. She said that she was dead, and that she was lying close to water. Why would she have said that if it wasn’t true?’

  ‘Two rivers and a canal run through this city, Mary,’ I say. ‘If Linda was dead – which she isn’t – then of course she’d be lying near water. None of us in Oxford is ever very far from water.’

  ‘And she said that we shouldn’t bother to look for her, because what happened to her is all her own fault.’

  I’m tempted to say that we should respect Linda’s wishes then, and stop looking for her – but that would only feed Mary’s delusion that she’d actually talked to her daughter.

  ‘The medium may have genuinely been trying to help you, or she may just have seen you as an easy mark but, whichever it is, you can’t trust what she told you,’ I say.

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything. It was Linda who told me.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘She doesn’t want me to look for her, but I have to. Her soul will never rest until she’s given a decent Christian burial.’

  ‘I have to go, Mary,’ I say.

  ‘If you don’t help me, I’ll kill myself,’ she screams, her fists clenched into tight little balls. ‘I’ll do it – I swear I will.’

  I don’t exactly believe her – she is, after all, an aficionada of amateur dramatics – but the problem is that I don’t exactly disbelieve her, either.

  I am not in the business of tracking down runaways and dragging them back home. Linda is of an age at which she is entitled to make her own decisions but, even if she wasn’t, the law simply does not give me that power.

  And anyway, if Linda has gone to London, I will never find her, because London is a very big city, and I simply don’t have the resources at my command.

  But, I argue to myself, if I can at least come up with some proof that the girl has left Oxford of her own free will, then I will have done all that is humanly possible – and if Mary Corbet still chooses to top herself after that, it will have nothing to do with me.

  She’s looking at me. She knows she’s broken down my resolve, and she’s doing her very best not to give me a last-minute escape route by seeming too triumphant.

  ‘I’ll give the investigation another two days of my time,’ I say.

  ‘But two days may not be—’ she starts to protest.

  ‘Two days,’ I repeat firmly, holding up my hand to emphasize my determination. And then, to make sure I’ve left no loopholes open, I spell it out even more clearly. ‘That’s forty-eight hours, Mary.’

  ‘I know.’

  I make a show of examining my watch. ‘Forty-eight hours starting from right now.’

  ‘Oh thank you, Jennie,’ she says with a humility that makes me want to curl up and die. ‘Thank you so much.’

  FIVE

  The senior tutor at St Margaret’s High School for Girls is called Mrs Conner. She wears purple-tinted half-moon glasses, which could, I suppose, be for a medical condition, but they blend in so well with her tightly curled blonde hair and her suede waistcoat that I’m guessing they’re more of a fashion statement. She is in her late thirties, and exudes an air of brisk efficiency which, as I look at her across the desk, I perversely find both admirable and annoying.

  ‘You say that you’re acting on behalf of Linda’s parents, Miss Redhead,’ she says.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you have anything in writing to confirm that?’

  No, I think, but I’ve a pocket full of bank notes to prove how serious Mrs Corbet is. Will that do? What I actually say is, ‘I’m afraid not. They didn’t seem to think that would be necessary.’

  ‘Ah, then we find ourselves in a rather tricky situation. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m questioning your integrity …’