The week after that, the Chronicle reported, an expert on wind and water current patterns had been called in from Oxford University. Cardiff University in Wales sent the top tide man from their Hydro-Environmental Research Center. When the two experts put their heads together, they produced a series of graphs and hydrographic charts with circles and arrows, and the joint opinion that Beth’s body had floated out to sea.
The week after that, nothing. Ditto the week after that.
As far as the Dartmouth Chronicle was concerned, Beth Hamilton had vanished off the face of the earth.
I sat back and gnawed on my thumbnail. The way I saw it, there were four possible explanations for Beth’s disappearance:
Beth had tumbled overboard and drowned. An accident.
She’d jumped overboard and drowned. A suicide.
She’d been boarded, clobbered, and thrown overboard. Murder.
She went sailing, leaped overboard, swam to shore and disappeared. A runaway.
‘Beth is a strong swimmer,’ Jon had been quoted as saying. Is, I noticed, and not was. But what could she have been running away from? A bad marriage? From what Alison had told me, their marriage had been perfect, so there was little likelihood of that.
If not running from something, was there anything she’d been running to? A lover, perhaps?
I wanted to slap myself for thinking such vulgar thoughts, but the idea must have occurred to the police, too. Two weeks after she went missing, the Chronicle had published a picture of Beth with the caption, ‘Have you seen this woman?’
Only four explanations for Beth’s disappearance. I rubbed my tired eyes and went over them again in my head. Accident, suicide, murder or AWOL. No, wait a minute. Five. Beth could have been abducted by aliens.
Maybe I needed a break.
As I was returning the microfilm reels to the reference desk, I remembered something Janet Brelsford had said the night of the party: each year the Dart takes a heart.
Back at the computer, with Newsbank on the screen, I put my fingers on the keyboard and typed in ‘Dart’ and ‘Drowning,’ then scanned the search results covering the past ten years. One death a year was about right. A tourist falls off a luxury yacht; a widow drowns near her favorite spot; a canoeist is trapped under his overturned canoe; a drunken youth tumbles off the Embankment. In most cases, the body of the victim had been recovered in a few days. In one case, rescue teams used an Air Force search and rescue helicopter equipped with thermal imaging cameras to help find the body.
Alas, no such technology had been called into play when Beth Hamilton went missing. Gradually, everybody seemed to forget about poor Beth, except for Jon Hamilton and his daughter, Kitty, age six.
THIRTEEN
‘An elderly driver caused a spectacle when his vehicle crashed into an opticians. The man, aged 89, had only just started his automatic car when it ploughed into the front of Sussex Eyecare in Broad Street, Seaford. Daeron McGee, the owner of the opticians, said: “I was round the corner… and came back to see a car in my front window. The driver seems to be OK… He said he had a dizzy turn and hit the accelerator instead of the brake. Thankfully there was nobody in his way but I’ve got an entire range of Oakleys and Ray Bans which have been demolished.”’‘Elderly Driver Creates Spectacle At Seaford Opticians’, Brighton News, 27 June 2009
Wednesday morning dawned dark and drear, with rain drizzling from a leaden sky. An earlier phone call to Alison had produced nothing but an invitation to leave a message on her call minder, so after a quick breakfast, I zipped myself up in a slicker, grabbed an umbrella and headed up Waterpool Road to her house.
The way Alison had been carrying on the previous day, I expected to find the shades drawn, a black wreath on the door, and have my knock answered by a lugubrious butler droning, ‘I’m sorry, Madam, but Madam is indisposed.’
Imagine my surprise, then, when Alison herself opened the door almost immediately, dressed in neat jeans and an Aran pullover, hair brushed until it shone, and make-up so expertly applied that it hardly showed. She held an open lipstick in her hand; I’d apparently interrupted her in the act of applying it while peering into the mirror in the tiny foyer.
‘Come in, Hannah! Good to see you.’ She stepped aside so I could get out of the rain. ‘I’m just heading out, I’m afraid. Dad called this morning all at sixes and sevens. He’s got some Hooray Henries coming all the way from Manchester for a viewing, and the house is a tip.’ She opened a handbag that lay on the table under the mirror and tossed her lipstick in. ‘But then, what else is new?’
‘I just stopped by to see how you’re doing. I called first, but got the machine.’
‘Sorry! I unplugged the phone yesterday and forgot to plug it back in.’ She reached for a raincoat that hung on a hook behind the door. ‘Almost wish I hadn’t. Dad’s call came in so fast after I plugged it back in that he must have had me on speed dial.’
‘Want company?’
‘That would be super!’
Three pairs of boots were lined up along the wall under the coat rack. Alison reached down and handed me a bright green pair. ‘You’ll need some wellies,’ she said. ‘It’s been raining since midnight and the lane is going to be a mucky mess.’
I held the bottom of one of the wellies up against my shoe. ‘It should fit.’
‘They’re Kitty’s,’ she said, referring to her daughter. ‘I’ve been nagging her to come and pick them up, but now I’m glad she didn’t.’
I sat down on the third step of the staircase that led up to the first floor, pulled on the wellies, turning my foot this way and that, admiring the fit. ‘These will do nicely.’
Alison slipped her feet into her own boots, grabbed an umbrella out of the stand and waved it in the air like a baton. ‘Why couldn’t those people come on a sunny day! Sod’s law, I suppose. Ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’
The twenty-minute drive to Three Trees Farm took us nearly forty. Alison had not yet replaced her Micra, so we were riding in Jon’s old but still serviceable Peugeot. Even with the windshield wipers set to frantic, visibility was so poor that Alison hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it tightly with both hands, focusing her attention to the road. When we reached the relatively straight stretch on the outskirts of Merrifield and Alison relaxed her grip on the wheel, I figured the time had come. ‘Can I ask you something, Alison?’
‘What?’
‘Kitty. Is she yours, or is she Jon’s by his first marriage?’
Alison took her eyes off the road long enough to flash me a wan grin. ‘I think you can do the math on that, Hannah.’
‘She’s twenty-one, and you and Jon have been married for… how long? Fifteen years?’
‘Bingo.’
‘So she’s Beth’s daughter?’
Alison bit her lower lip, concentrating as she guided the car through a pool of water that had accumulated on the road. ‘Yes.’
I’ve got a fairly tough skin, but the fact that Alison hadn’t shared that important part of her personal history with me really stung. But I decided there was no profit in giving Alison a hard time about it. I was sure she had her reasons, and with time and a little gentle prodding, I’d find out what they were.
‘It never occurred to me that Kitty wasn’t your biological daughter,’ I said. ‘She looks like you for one thing. Same coppery hair, same green eyes.’
‘She favors Beth,’ Alison said wistfully. After a beat she added, ‘I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t why Jon was attracted to me in the first place.’