The Missing Girl

At half past seven the following morning Thomas brought the Humber round to the side entrance. He waited there for fifteen minutes before going in search of Alice.

Mrs Pearce was in the stillroom. She had assumed Alice had already left and seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Thomas was waiting for her. Alice, he explained, had found him in the motor house the previous evening and asked to be driven to the station at half past seven. She had been quite definite about it.

Mrs Pearce stopped what she was doing. One of the girls was sent upstairs.

Alice’s bed had not been slept in. Her trunk stood packed against the wall. Her brown coat and handbag were gone.

By eight o’clock Edwin knew about Thomas. He had been reading the morning paper over breakfast, still full of the Reichstag fire and Herr Hitler’s new government, when Mrs Pearce came in and explained what had happened. Edwin folded the paper and listened. When she had finished, he asked her to send Thomas in.

The driver repeated much the same account. Alice had asked personally to be taken into town for the station. No, he did not remember her naming a train. She had only said she wanted to go early.

Edwin buttered a piece of toast. “Then she changed her mind.”

Mrs Pearce glanced at Thomas. It was barely anything, but Edwin saw it.

“She told me last night that she might leave sooner.”

He need not have said that.

Mrs Pearce appeared willing enough to accept it. Thomas was less easily satisfied. If Alice had changed her mind about the car, he said, she still had a fair walk into town at that hour.

“A mile and three quarters,” Edwin said. “Alice was twenty-two, not infirm.”

Thomas lowered his eyes. “Of course, sir.”

Edwin expected that to be the end of it.

It was not.

Alice’s trunk remained packed against the bedroom wall. Mrs Pearce put her wages aside and waited for an address. None came. For several days there was little talk of anything else below stairs. Some of the servants thought Alice had gone off with a man. Molly said she had seemed worried rather than excited, though she could not explain why. Thomas continued to mention the car. Mrs Pearce disliked the whole business.

Edwin disliked that they continued discussing it.

By the weekend the subject had begun to fade. On Monday, with still no address for the trunk, Mrs Pearce wrote to Alice’s family.

The reply came on the second Saturday after Alice disappeared.

Mrs Mercer said there must have been some mistake. Alice had not come home. They had heard nothing from her since shortly after Christmas and had not expected her. There was no family trouble that required her return. If anyone at Harcourt knew where she had gone, Mrs Mercer would be grateful to hear from them.

Edwin read the letter twice.

There was nothing alarming in it.

Mrs Pearce remained standing opposite the desk. The difficulty, she said, was that Alice had plainly lied. There had been no trouble at home. She had arranged a car to the station, vanished before morning without using it, and nobody had seen her leave. Now her family had no idea where she was either.

For the first time Edwin heard the facts placed together by somebody else.

He found the experience irritating.

“Girls leave houses every day,” he said. “They sometimes lie about where they are going.”

Mrs Pearce agreed that they did. She folded the letter but made no move towards the door.

“Her mother sounds frightened.”

“Then write and tell her what we know.”

Which, as far as Edwin was concerned, ended the matter. Alice had announced that she was leaving Harcourt. Whatever happened after that had happened away from the household.

Mrs Pearce still did not move.

“Was there something else?”

“No, sir.”

After she had gone Edwin found himself reading the same paragraph of correspondence several times.

Alice had complicated matters.

There had been no reason to involve Thomas. Edwin had told her when she was to leave and that they would settle everything privately. Instead she had taken it upon herself to arrange a car she could never use and left another person expecting to see her in the morning.

It was typical of the kind of thoughtlessness which had brought the entire situation about.

At luncheon Penelope remarked that Mrs Pearce seemed distracted. One of the girls had disappeared, apparently. When Edwin told her it was Alice Mercer, Penelope remembered the pretty dark-haired girl who had once dropped an entire tray of glasses during a garden luncheon and gone so red that Penelope had pretended not to notice.

“How awful for her people.”

“She is twenty-two.”

Penelope looked at him. “I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“It means she is old enough to go where she pleases.”

Edwin cut into his lamb. Penelope accepted the answer, though without much enthusiasm, and the conversation moved on.

The following morning she asked Mrs Pearce whether Alice’s mother had been answered and told her to keep the girl’s wages aside. If the family wished to come to Harcourt, they were to know that they could.

Two days later a constable came from the village.

Edwin received him in the morning room rather than the study. It was smaller and prevented the visit acquiring an importance it did not deserve.

Constable Hale was a thickset man in his forties whom Edwin recognised from village functions. He apologised for troubling him almost before he had entered and remained standing until Edwin indicated a chair. Edwin did not offer tea.

Alice’s father, Hale explained, had contacted the police in Shrewsbury. Enquiries there had produced nothing, and as Harcourt was the last place at which Alice had certainly been seen, they had been asked to make a few enquiries locally.

Most of the questions were harmless. How long had Alice worked there? A little over two years. Had she seemed unhappy? Perhaps dissatisfied lately. Had she spoken of leaving? Yes. Mrs Pearce could confirm that she had announced her intention to go away on Wednesday.

Then Hale asked whether Edwin knew much about Alice’s private life.

Edwin looked at him. “I don’t make a habit of studying the private lives of kitchen maids, Constable.”

Hale apologised.

Edwin had not complained.

The constable turned a page in his notebook. Thomas Webb, he said, had told them Alice arranged to be driven to the station on Thursday morning but apparently left before then. Did Edwin happen to know why?

“She changed her mind.”

Hale’s pencil stopped. “Did she tell you that, sir?”

“Yes.”

This time the lie was necessary.

Hale wrote it down and asked when she had told him. Edwin said late Wednesday evening, in the back passage.

“And that was the last time you saw her?”

Edwin looked at him. The pencil remained poised above the notebook.

“I believe so.”

Hale wrote again.

It was not an accusation. Barely even a question. Nevertheless Edwin understood the shape of it immediately.

He had just made himself the last person known to have spoken to Alice.

The constable continued. Had she seemed frightened? No. Upset? Perhaps. Had she said she was meeting anyone? No. Did Edwin know how she intended to reach town after deciding not to use Thomas?

“I did not ask.”

“I see.”

“Do you?”

Hale looked up.

Edwin smiled faintly.

The constable explained that they were only trying to establish Alice’s movements. Nobody at the station remembered seeing her on Thursday morning, and nobody they had spoken to along the road remembered a young woman walking towards town. That proved very little, of course.

“Very little happens on that road before eight,” Edwin said.

“No, sir.”

“Yet apparently half the county is now expected to account for having failed to notice a kitchen maid walking along it.”

Hale coloured. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Then we understand one another.”

The notebook closed soon afterward. Hale thanked him for his time and left. Edwin remained seated until the door had shut behind him.

The interview had gone perfectly well.

Nevertheless, after a minute he rose and went to the window.

From there he could see only a narrow portion of the pond between the trees.

Nothing moved.