Gregory Hall - A Sleep and A Forgetting

‘Something serious? What do you mean?’

‘Isn’t it rather obvious? It’s desperately upsetting but we can’t yet rule out the possibility that she might have been attacked or abducted. I don’t want to think these things, but it seems to me they have to be considered.’

‘But is there any indication of something like that having happened?’

‘Here? None whatever. But it could have happened while she was out. You know how much she likes rambling around the countryside. But we could speculate endlessly and quite pointlessly. That’s why I’m going to the police. They have the resources and the knowledge to do what’s necessary.’

‘What about Charlotte?’

‘She’s not home until Friday. Besides, if Flora does turn up, there may in the end be nothing to tell her.’

Catriona sat unmoving staring at the phone for long after he had rung off.

In the light of what Bill knew, the action he proposed was entirely logical. He was, after all, a scientist. A disappearing spouse was no different from one of Newton’s billiard balls. If she had moved, some force must have acted upon her. All appropriate means should therefore be taken to identify that force.

Was she right to deny him the data concerning the nature of the force that might have acted? Was she concealing vital information for her own selfish reasons? If Flora did not return in the next few days, would she then be bound to reveal all she knew? Her gorge rose at the very thought of that idea, of broaching that taboo with such a man.

Did he in fact even care what had happened to his wife? Had the marriage been a mere shell with no kernel of love or affection? There had seemed at some points to be in him more anger than concern, as if he felt that Flora had been playing some kind of game with him. But the contemplation of her abduction, injury or even death had shown a little more of his vulnerability, and a little was a great deal in a man of his generally dispassionate nature.

And Flora, this new Flora whom she hardly knew, was she really playing some sort of attention-seeking game? At that, Catriona found that she too could feel anger and resentment, mixed with her anxiety and grief. And wasn’t suicide itself the ultimate piece of attention-seeking, the easy, the coward’s way out? Wasn’t that why she herself had shunned it? How could Flora have vanished in this fashion, leaving such emotional wreckage in her wake? Was it desperation that caused it, or cruelty – a desire to wound and to punish? Each thought was like a further stone added to the cairn of desolation in her heart. How could she have been abandoned like this, full of a grief that could neither be assuaged with knowledge or purged by death?

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