Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

What’s worse is that Barry is looking increasingly like her best bet. The police are offering her no joy, no hope, no consolation. Carlton’s family assume he is off on some madcap, playboy escapade and will return unharmed. If he’d really been kidnapped there’d be a ransom note, a set of demands. She has mentioned her plight to some of her colleagues at the television company and, to her dismay, nobody thinks there’s a story in it. And as if that wasn’t enough her producer has been on her back saying she’s underperforming. She isn’t sparky enough for him any more. What’s happened to the old zany extrovert self, he wants to know. As if it isn’t obvious.

It is late. Alone in Carlton’s gentleman’s residence now, Marilyn feels so lonely, so helpless and bereft. As on every other recent evening she is drinking Brandy Alexanders and watching videos of the Herbie movies. It feels like a downward slide.

Then a bell rings. She isn’t expecting anyone, and yet she feels that anyone who would be ringing Carlton’s bell at this time of night must surely have some connection with him, however vague, and might just possibly offer some clues. A little unsteadily she goes into the hall and looks at the video monitor which gives her a picture of her visitor. She sees a woman standing outside the gate. She is alone. She wears a leather jacket and leggings and a big studded belt. Marilyn doesn’t know her at first and yet there’s something definitely familiar about her. Marilyn throws the switch that opens the gate and the visitor walks in. Marilyn greets her at the front door.

“Hello, I’m Renata Caswell,” she says.

“My God, so you are.”

“You remember? I’m the one who exposed your friend Ishmael for the dangerous little charlatan he was.”

“I remember it all,” says Marilyn.

“Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you about Carlton.”

Those are the magic words, the open sesame. If she can’t have Carlton, if she can’t know that he’s safe, then she’ll have to make do with talking about him. It will only be a small pleasure but it will be as great as any she’s got. Marilyn invites Renata in. They go into the kitchen, a room only lightly marked by Carlton Bax’s mania for Beetles. Apart from the Beetle salt and pepper pots, the Beetle mugs, the beetle cookie jar and the Beetle tea towels, it looks like a fairly normal kitchen. Renata can barely hide her disappointment.

“What do you want to say about Carlton?” Marilyn asks.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about him, that’s all.”

Marilyn is desperate to talk about him but she still has the dignity to ask, “Why?”

“Oh,” says Renata breezily, “I think I might like to write a piece about him.”

Marilyn looks daggers at her and she drops her breezi-ness.

“Okay,” she says, “I know he’s gone missing. Maybe I could help. Maybe I could stir public sympathy, stir some public outrage about the fact that the police are doing so little. It just might help to find him.”

“How do you even know that Carlton’s missing? It hasn’t been in any of the papers.”

“I have my sources.”

“I bet you do. And I bet you have to protect them.”

“Of course.”

Nevertheless, Marilyn talks to her about Carlton. She talks about his kindness, how inherited wealth hasn’t spoiled him, about certain conflicts he experienced when he refused to toe the line and become another cog in the Bax family empire. She mentions his education and his first unsuccessful marriage. She denies that he was ever a playboy or gambler or self-destructive drinker. Renata jots down a few shorthand notes but she doesn’t seem quite as interested as she ought to be if she’s really planning to write a campaigning article. All this amounts to little more than background. Surely Renata could have got all this from a cuttings library.

“And what about the Volkswagen collection?” Renata asks.

It’s asked politely enough but somehow Marilyn knows that Renata Caswell is more interested in the Volkswagens than in the man; a problem Marilyn has seen before. And when she asks to be shown round the collection, Marilyn fears Renata will be writing another article, the latest in a series, that depicts Carlton as some sort of poor little rich boy, ageing but immature, childishly eccentric, with more money than sense.

“There have been an awful lot of boring articles about the collection,” Marilyn says, but she still agrees to show it to Renata.

The tour begins. Marilyn points out items that she has learned are of interest to visitors: a KdF saver’s card; a model of a Beetle made out of cigarette packets by a German prisoner of war who had worked on Dr Porsche’s prototypes before the war; a number of pre-war Volkswagen badges designed by Franz Xavier Reimspiess showing the familiar interlocking Volkswagen logo but here it is surrounded by the DAF cogwheel design.

Renata seems intensely and genuinely interested, and Marilyn has witnessed this before too. Carlton was always showing his collection to visiting enthusiasts, and although Marilyn understands this enthusiasm intellectually, she can’t exactly share it, and it seems strange to find any such enthusiasm in a woman like Renata.

“Is there a catalogue?” Renata asks, innocently enough.

“A what?”

“I mean there must be a filing system or an archive or a computer disc maybe that lists anything and everything in the collection.”

“How would I know?” says Marilyn. “It’s Carlton’s collection, not mine.”

“But surely, a collection of this size…”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” says Renata, and although Marilyn can’t see that it’s such a shame, it’s about now she realises that Renata Caswell must know a great deal more than she’s telling.

“Are you saying that Carlton’s disappearance is because of the collection?”

Renata has to ruminate carefully before she says, “That’s what my sources seem to suggest.”

“But I don’t understand. How could that be?”

Renata takes a deep breath before saying, “Well, what if Carlton had some piece of unique Volkswagen memorabilia, something impossibly rare, something utterly priceless that some rival collector would want very badly indeed. And what if that other collector tried to buy it, and what if he begged and pleaded and cajoled, maybe even threatened; but Carlton wouldn’t part with it. Well, if he wanted it badly enough he might think the only way to get it was to steal it. But that wouldn’t work. Carlton wasn’t stupid. If he knew someone wanted to steal something he’d keep it doubly safe, maybe off premises, maybe in some kind of vault, in some sort of locked room. Yes?”

“And what if the rival collector was aware of all this. Well, the next step might be to try to locate this locked room and break into it. But locating it wouldn’t be easy. You’d need Carlton to tell you where it was, and that’s the last thing he’d want to tell you. So someone might pick him up, knock him around a little, tell him he’ll be released just as soon as he spills the beans. And if he didn’t spill them, then this could go on for a very long time, and this rival collector could get very angry and very dangerous indeed.”

“Is all this true?” Marilyn demands.

“It’s what my sources suggest.”

“Do you believe them?”

“I think so.”

“And where does my father fit into all this?”

“ Your father? ”

Something tells Marilyn that she should keep at least some information to herself, so she says no more about her father and nothing at all about Barry. Instead she asks, “But how could this be? How could anyone want a piece of Volkswagen memorabilia so very badly? What sort of item could possibly be that important or that desirable?”