Emma Page - Hard Evidence

He was strongly minded to do nothing whatever in the matter. But there were the Eardlows, old, frail, anxious. ‘Better look into it,’ he told Lambert grudgingly. ‘But don’t go making a big production number out of it, just fit it in with everything else.’ Lambert knew the form well enough, he’d been over this kind of ground often before. He knew precisely how much time to spend, how much to do, just enough to be able to reassure the relatives the police were reasonably certain the girl had come to no harm. And that was what he set about over the next few days. His first step was to discover via a series of phone calls which estate agents in the area handled holiday lettings of caravans. He found three and went off to visit them all. He was in luck. At his first call, an office in the centre of Cannonbridge, the manager produced records which showed that a caravan had indeed been rented by a Miss Julie Dawson, giving the Honeysuckle Cottage address. She had taken the caravan from Tuesday, May 16th, to Saturday, May 27th. She had paid in full, in advance, by cheque, on Monday, May 15th. He could supply no further details himself, he didn’t attend to such bookings, but he passed Lambert on to the female clerk who had dealt with Miss Dawson. The woman did recall the matter. Two details in particular stood out in her memory: Miss Dawson’s unusually beautiful hair and her insistence on the cheapest possible let. She didn’t mind where the caravan was or how basic its amenities but she wanted to move in as soon as possible. The clerk was able to suit Miss Dawson immediately with the cheapest caravan on their books. It was old, isolated, furnished and equipped to a bare minimum, and in consequence difficult to let. It belonged to a fishing enthusiast, a bachelor, who kept it principally for his own use, whenever he could get away from his city job to fish the local streams. It was vacant at the time Miss Dawson made her inquiry; the next booking was for May 27th. Miss Dawson took it for the whole of the interim.

The caravan stood on a small farm a few miles from Calcott village. The clerk gave Miss Dawson directions for finding the farm; the keys were kept at the farmhouse. ‘Something else, I remember,’ she threw in suddenly. ‘Miss Dawson didn’t stay quite the full time at the caravan. And she didn’t return the keys to the farmhouse. They were dropped in here.’ She had found them in the mail on the Friday morning, May 26th; they hadn’t been sent by post, they had been delivered by hand. She particularly remembered because there had been no note, no word of any kind with the keys. They had simply been put into an envelope and pushed through the letter box. Every key ring carried a tag giving the name and address of the estate agent, together with a number identifying the property to which the keys belonged.

There had been no further contact of any kind with Miss Dawson. The clerk had no idea where she might have gone after leaving the caravan.

The following afternoon Lambert drove out to the farm, a small, old-fashioned, man-and-wife enterprise that appeared far from thriving. A stream ran between overhanging willows along one boundary. Close by, Lambert saw a sizable stretch of shadowy, gloomy-looking woodland, overgrown and neglected.

He walked across the cobbled yard to the farmhouse. His knock at the door was answered by a harassed-looking woman in late middle age. Her hands were covered in flour, wisps of hair stuck out around her face. She didn’t invite Lambert inside but answered his questions on the doorstep, briskly and without embellishment, already half turned back towards the demands of her kitchen. Her husband wasn’t in, he was out at a farm sale, she couldn’t say when he’d be back.

Yes, she remembered Miss Dawson very well; that is, she couldn’t recall the name but she did clearly remember a girl staying in the caravan in the latter part of May. It was the only time she could remember a pretty young girl staying in the caravan on her own, and she too had been struck by the beauty of the girl’s hair. Miss Dawson had also been unusual in that she had never called at the farmhouse for milk, eggs or vegetables, had never stopped by for a chat, never asked if it was all right if she took a stroll round the farm. ‘In fact, I only ever saw her twice,’ the woman added. ‘The day she came, when she called in here for the keys, and one other time, a day or two later – I saw her in the distance, walking towards the wood.’ The caravan stood at quite some distance from the house and wasn’t visible from it.

The woman was paid to clean the caravan after each let. There had been nothing untoward when she had cleaned through after Miss Dawson’s stay; she had found nothing left behind.

The caravan was currently occupied by a young couple with a baby. They had gone out for the day and wouldn’t be back till it was time to put the baby to bed. They would have taken the caravan keys with them; there was only the one set. She jerked her head. Even if she had a second set she wouldn’t have been happy about letting the sergeant take a look inside in the absence of the young couple. But he was welcome to walk over there, to see the location. He must excuse her from going with him, she was up to her eyes just now.

Lambert followed her directions. The caravan was in a secluded spot, well out of sight and earshot of both the farmhouse and the road, provided with an even greater degree of privacy by a thick screen of trees. The caravan curtains had been left closed.

He stood for some moments glancing about. The breeze carried with it the scent of clover fields. From the topmost branches of a nearby tree rang out the clear, bell-like notes of a blackcap.

The situation was certainly pleasant enough. Apart from the glowering presence of the wood.

Next day Sergeant Lambert found himself free in the middle of the morning to run over to Millbourne. The town was somewhat smaller than Cannonbridge, thirty miles away.

As he neared Honeysuckle Cottage the road took him through undulating countryside, past deep gorges running between thickly wooded hills, green copses, bracken-covered slopes, old gravel pits and quarries filled with water, hedgerows decked with wild roses.

Because of the phone call she had recently received from the Eardlows, Audrey Tysoe wasn’t surprised at Lambert’s visit. She was busy in the garden when he arrived but she broke off readily enough. Lambert noticed her limp. Habitual, he guessed, probably from some old injury; she used no stick, wore no plaster or bandage that might suggest a more recent mishap.

She took him into her charming cottage, sat him down and gave him coffee. No, she wasn’t anxious about Julie, she was sure she would turn up again before long. She had left most of her things at the cottage – that must surely mean she intended returning, if only to collect her belongings. She had lodged with Miss Tysoe for two years. Before that she had stayed with three or four other landladies but hadn’t been happy with any of them.

Miss Tysoe didn’t normally take in lodgers. She had been in charge of personnel at the Advertiser until her retirement and Julie had told her she hadn’t been able to find digs she was happy in. ‘I offered to take her in here, temporarily,’ Miss Tysoe explained. ‘Till she could look round to find somewhere she really liked. But we both found it worked well, her being here. I liked having someone around in the evenings and at weekends, and Julie liked living out of town; it was what she had been used to before she came to Millbourne. She wasn’t a girl who wanted to go out much in her free time. So she stayed on.’

But they had never been close. Both tended to be self-sufficient, and Julie was not by nature a confiding girl. It was a satisfactory relationship of good-natured live and let live, with mutual benefits. There had never been any friction between them.