Missing (56 page)

‘I don’t think she quite realised who you were,’ Angus replied disloyally.

Alice rolled her eyes, and continued to take in the sea of rustic, polished and mostly laughing faces. ‘It’s like a party,’ she declared, ‘which I suppose it is in a way. Just a pity we don’t have any champagne.’

‘There’ll be plenty after, courtesy of Sir Richard and his gorgeous wife Susie,’ Vivienne told her. ‘They called from Australia late last night to make a very handsome donation too, no strings attached.’

‘Ah! Don’t you just love them? And Angus has told me how many donations you’ve already had like that. It’s amazing. Brilliant. So how much is in the kitty so far?’

‘The last I heard it’s approaching twenty-four thousand, and the auction, as it stands, is expected to raise somewhere in the region of forty thousand.’

Alice’s eyes boggled. ‘My God, you’re surpassing yourself, my angel.’

‘Personally, I haven’t given anything yet,’ Vivienne laughed, ‘or not in a monetary sense. But it’s wonderful how generous everyone’s been since we got our charitable status. Now it’s tax-deductible there’s
an
even bigger incentive to cough up. Where’s Kayla, by the way?’

‘Would you believe, in the firemen’s dressing rooms?’ Alice replied with no little irony. ‘Making sure she has all their details was how she put it to me.’ Then, as someone started shepherding them towards the seating, ‘Oh, yippee, looks like we’re being asked to take our places. Angus, bring our paddle, darling, we’re going to win ourselves a fireman’s lift.’

Laughing, Vivienne turned to see if Miles was anywhere in sight, and spotting him coming her way with Al Kohler, she moved forward to meet them.

‘So here’s the bonnie wee lad,’ Kohler chuckled, his deeply lined features and shiny bald head looking rather hot under the lights. ‘I can see why your daddy’s very proud of you, young man.’

Clearly thrilled to be making yet another new friend, Rufus gurgled loudly and started banging his hands together.

Laughing, Kohler waited as Vivienne handed Rufus to Miles, then embraced her warmly. ‘Looks like we’ve quite an event on our hands,’ he said, smiling around him.

‘Thanks to you,’ she reminded him.

‘I don’t take other people’s credit,’ he said with a wink. ‘It’s all down to you.’ Then, as Miles turned away with Rufus, responding to one of the TV assistants who was trying to make them sit down, ‘Miles told me about tomorrow’s edition of
The News
.’

‘What do you think?’ she asked, glancing at Miles, but he obviously couldn’t hear.

‘What I
know
,’ Kohler replied, ‘is that the Critch has gone too far this time, and Justine has successfully dug her own grave. What matters, though, is Jacqueline.’

Vivienne regarded him soberly. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘but she might not read it, and anyway, I keep thinking, if she was going to do anything, well, like that, she’d have done it by now.’ She paused as he leant nearer to hear her better. ‘She’s had ample opportunity these past six weeks,’ she said, ‘and since the birthdays have come and gone …’

He was nodding. ‘Precisely,’ he agreed. ‘So the question is, why won’t she tell anyone where she is, or what she’s doing?’

‘Or,’ Vivienne added, ‘what she’s hiding from.’

On the small dining table that was pushed up against a flowery-papered wall was a copy of that morning’s newspaper, opened to a centre-page spread of the ‘boys up for bids’, as the paper was calling them. Next to it was a large notepad covered in neatly handwritten lines and a mobile phone. In the same room, set at an angle beside an original Edwardian fireplace, was a TV where a programme announcer was informing viewers that the much anticipated Slave Auction would begin after the commercial break.

The screen filled with an improbable happy family at breakfast, but Jacqueline’s thoughts remained with Kelsey and how excited she probably was now, not only to be there, at the auction, but to be so close to the event itself that she might even appear in shot.

She was glad for Kelsey, but her eyes were starting to glaze as her mind drifted on, like a restless spirit, to Miles, then Rufus, the church of St Anne, the Virgin Mary, and finally to the woman who’d resurfaced from the past, Elizabeth Barrett. Tomorrow her delusions would be released from obscurity to cover the front page of
The News on Sunday
. Her story would be told in
a
way to shock and unsettle, or there would be no point in running it. Once again people would start asking, what really happened to Sam Avery? Had he actually been in his mother’s car that day? How come no one saw him?

None of it had the power to hurt her any more. She only minded because it was prompting Miles to step up the search for her again. She didn’t want to be found yet. She had chosen her time and until it came she wanted to remain where she was, safe, in this place called missing. At her core there was only warmth and stillness; in her heart there was simply the memory of pain. The scars were fading like stars at dawn, blending with the light to become invisible, free of the darkness.

Her mobile started to ring. She looked down at it, already knowing it would be Kelsey making sure she was keeping her promise to watch. She let the call go through to messages. She’d speak to her when the auction was over, and assure her she’d seen every minute. She hoped Kelsey would be in shot. She hoped Miles, Vivienne and Rufus would be too. She’d like to see them all together before she turned off her phone and finished her letter.

That was when she would be ready to leave this place called missing.

‘Thought I might find you here, sir,’ DC Joy murmured as she came up behind Sadler at the back of the TV room, where practically the entire station was gathered to watch the auction. ‘I brought you a paddle in case you want to make a bid.’

Sadler cast her a sidelong glance.

Her eyes were all innocence. ‘Oh, your Christmas bonus already spoken for?’

Unable to suppress a smile, he said, ‘If my bonus came even close to where those bids began I’d be buying myself a DC with answers, instead of cheek.’

‘Sssssh,’ someone hissed from the front.

‘Oh my God. There’s Jamie Murray,’ a female voice cried out. ‘He was with the fire crew at my DUI in Marsh Barton last Wednesday.’

DC Joy looked at the dusty monitor where a delicious blond hunk with Herculean muscles, a fireman’s helmet, and salopette braces over his bare chest was swaggering up and down the catwalk in time to ‘Come on Baby Light My Fire’. The audience was responding wildly to his gyrations, while across the bottom of the screen the bids for his skills as gardener-cum-chauffeur – or Mellors, as he was letting himself be known – flipped up and up and up with the speed of Third World inflation.

‘Do you think that’s real?’ Joy whispered to Sadler. ‘I mean, are that many people really ringing in?’

‘Thankfully that is a mystery we’re not here to solve,’ Sadler responded dryly. ‘What news on Mrs Avery?’

‘DC Ball in Richmond says they’ve contacted all the agents now, and there’s still nothing coming up under the names of Avery or Cates.’

Sadler shook his head, more bothered than ever since Miles Avery had been in touch, worried about the possible effects of Sunday’s paper. ‘I take it they’ve tried Jacqueline Cates and Anne Avery,’ he said, knowing already this would have been done.

Joy gave him a look to confirm it.

‘What about her maiden name?’ he said, knowing it was idiocy even to go there at this stage.

Joy appeared slightly disconcerted. ‘I didn’t think of that, sir,’ she confessed.

‘Then think about it now, Elaine, there’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘Probably they’re ahead of you in Richmond, but we never know.’

Her eyes strayed back to the screen.

‘Scoot,’ he growled in her ear.

‘On my way, sir,’ she said with a cheeky salute. ‘Just please don’t blow the entire annual on TKS, because I don’t earn as much as you and I want him for me.’

One by one the firemen were dancing down the catwalk, each of them in various states of dress – or undress – as they performed to such numbers as ‘Wheels on Fire’, ‘Start the Fire’, and ‘Great Balls of Fire’. The female members of the audience were lapping it up, applauding and laughing delightedly as someone rotated a cheekily exposed shoulder, or gyrated his hips, or pouted winsomely into camera.

Reg was doing a valiant job, in spite of the noise, encouraging the audience – and viewers at home – to up the bidding for the firemen’s ‘back-room skills’ as he was calling them. His innuendos and double entendres were rife and hilarious, while the performances became raunchier and more expansive all the time. Most importantly, though, the bids were very quickly showing signs of surpassing everyone’s dreams. Twelve hundred pounds for a private chauffeur for a week; fifteen hundred for Spanish lessons; eighteen hundred for a gardener for a month; a whopping eight thousand for Percy to rewire a house; two thousand for Pete the plumber who roused the audience to a frenzy with his plunger, and another two thousand for Rick the DIY enthusiast whose bag of tools got Reg into an hysterical tangle of puns, alliterations and promises.

By the time the amateur weight-lifter – a huge, bald-headed
man
in skimpy trunks, protective boots and a yellow standard-issue helmet – had brought the house down with his mincing and flexing, the amount raised from the auction was already standing at close to thirty thousand pounds.

‘It’s amazing!’ Vivienne cried to Alice, applauding wildly along with everyone else, and catching the choreographer’s eye across the catwalk, she gave her two robust thumbs up. ‘Fabulous,’ she mouthed. ‘Sensational.’

The choreographer was beaming, while Reg laughed heartily as he waited for the applause to die down behind the weight-lifter. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced like an end-of-pier compère, ‘please get those paddles waving and pound notes flying for our very own golden boy, the free-styler extraordinaire, the fastest man in Speedos, and hottest hunk in a hairy chest, Mr Theo Kenwood-South.’

‘Who’s writing his script?’ Alice demanded as the place erupted with a rapturous welcome for Theo.

‘I think he’s making it up as he goes along,’ Vivienne answered, laughing as Theo came swaggering onto the catwalk in luminous silver shorts and an enormous pair of madly glittering goggles. The music paused as he struck his opening pose. Everyone fell silent. Then up came the opening bars of ‘Hey Big Spender’ and the audience exploded into laughter.

His routine was so camp and outrageous that before long it became virtually impossible to hear Reg over the din, as everyone whooped and cheered him on. However, the production team was keeping a close watch on the bids, relaying information to relevant sources, signalling to Reg and urging everyone to dig deeper and deeper. Then suddenly, like a stripper,
Theo
tore off his Velcro-held shorts, swirled them a few times round his head, and sent them sailing into the audience. Wild shrieks filled the air as literally hundreds of eager hands rose up to grab the trophy. He was now in gold sparkly trunks and dollar-sign goggles that someone tossed in from the wings, dancing up and down the catwalk to ‘Money, Money, Money’.

‘It must be like this at a Chippendale show,’ Alice shouted into Vivienne’s ear, as Kelsey and Martha leapt up to join those who were already dancing on their chairs. ‘Someone’s going to throw their knickers in any minute. You wait.’

‘Just don’t let it be you,’ Vivienne warned, struggling to hold onto a delirious Rufus.

‘Not wearing any, darling.’

With a gurgle of laughter Vivienne released Rufus into Miles’s stronger grasp, then promptly jumped up with Alice and Kayla to join in the dancing.

‘Look at how high the bids are going,’ she shouted, pointing to the off-air monitor. ‘It’s already at nine thousand.’

At that moment the screen changed to a shot of a WI lady receiving a call which upped the figure to ten thousand. ‘I wonder who’s on the other end?’ Alice yelled as a massive cheer went up and Theo gave an exaggerated bow, followed by a couple of bicep flexes.

‘Probably his mother,’ Vivienne replied and they burst out laughing.

‘Oh my God, he’s shameless,’ Alice shrieked, as Theo began a very suggestive simulated swim.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Reg boomed into his microphone, ‘do we have any advances on ten thousand for private time with this swimmer sublime?’

‘Oh God,’ Vivienne groaned, as a hundred paddles rose up and as many voices yelled, ‘Eleven, twelve, fifteen,
twenty
.’

‘Come on now, ladies,’ Reg cautioned, ‘don’t start what you can’t finish.’

As they screamed with laughter, Mrs Kent, a local businesswoman known to have a penchant for young men, upped the bidding to ten thousand five hundred.

‘Thank you, Mrs Kent,’ Reg shouted above the crowd, and as everyone cheered the monitor switched back to a shot of the WI lady, whose caller took little time to increase the figure to eleven.

‘Eleven thousand,’ Reg cried ecstatically. ‘Friends, we are making history today. I have eleven thousand so far for private coaching and a day using the fantastic facilities in Bath with Britain’s very own Olympic gold-medallist. Now, do I hear twelve? Come on, ladies, let TKS help ease the PMS.’

‘Please tell me he didn’t just say that,’ Vivienne winced as a stream of voices yelled, ‘Me, me, me.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ Alice laughed, ‘he could end up with his own show at this rate and he’ll be our client.’

Theo was boogieing forward, twirling and teasing, urging the audience to clap and dance along with him until, to a rousing cheer, he reached out to haul Stella up onto the catwalk. The brazen old eccentric immediately began stealing the show with an hilarious freak-out not at all in time to the music, while Theo pirouetted around her before turning to grab Kelsey’s and Martha’s hands to pull them up too.

Vivienne swung round to Miles and burst out laughing at the look on his face.

‘That’s my daughter,’ he stated indignantly, but his
eyes
were shining, and seeming to decide that his son could no longer be stopped from joining in, he stood up so Rufus could try and clap his hands as high as everyone else.