*****
‘Two years. Two years I had my daughter for; and then she went again.’ Anthony Aubrey shot Grey a look of such pity and longing, that the detective could only guess at how destroying Isobel’s abandonment of him, of him personally as he would have seen it, must have felt.
‘Two years, and then she left with that vermin. Isobel, Isobel,’ he began asking, as if she were with them in the room. ‘You knew how much I loved you and you cut me out. You were my secret, the only one I loved, and I couldn’t tell anyone. Have you any idea how hard that was? To love you so much and not have anybody know?’
Grey wondered if he were in the presence of someone losing their mind, the big man slumped now at the table as he had been earlier over his office desk.
‘But she must have gotten back in touch?’ asked the Inspector quickly, if only to break the mood. The question seemed to perk the man up a bit,
‘When I bought the Jaguar in the Eighties it had had a carphone fitted. An ugly thing, and I should have had it taken out in the restoration. But you see I learnt a while ago – and please don’t ask me how – that it has the advantage of being very hard for anyone to trace or tap. All that time she’d kept the number, and when she needed to she called.’
Grey noted the man’s satisfaction as he said that last line.
‘And this was?’
‘Oh, months ago now, I remember she wishing me Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!’ he laughed.
‘So what else was said?’
‘She admitted that she had made a mistake, that Carman was a bad man doing bad things, and that she didn’t know what to do.’
Grey wondered if this was exactly as Isobel would have put it, but persevered,
‘And so you stayed in touch?’
‘I think we’d both missed it. We could drive each other mad, but she trusted me, she knew I would be there.’
‘And eventually...’
‘Eventually we spoke about her coming home.’
‘Tell me what you planned.’
‘Well planned is overstating it! She had hopes of getting away, dreams of where to go, but nothing concrete. She didn’t know what was involved, she’d never been abroad you see. Of course I offered to help her, to set her up somewhere or pay her fare wherever she wanted... I knew she didn’t want to come back to town really, no matter how I’d have liked her to.’
‘And then all of a sudden the timescale was shortened...’
The man took a deep intake of breath, before answering, ‘As I sat across from Thomas at the Club that night, I knew it was now or never, that I hadn’t time to wait – the firm might be going under any day now, and if that happened I’d be ruined, investigated, bankrupted, assets frozen... So I phoned her that evening and offered her ten thousand pounds, I didn’t care where she went on it, along with all the help I could offer her. But that it had to be this week.’
‘And…’
‘And when I suggested it she told me to book a hotel room, and she would be here the next day.
‘You see I knew the trouble this business at the factory would cause,’ continued Aubrey, ‘for the employees, for the whole town. And I thought that if it was all over, then I still had a couple of days to do something good, to make one last positive contribution, to bring back Southney’s Snowdrop.’
‘Good for the town or good for yourself?’
‘For all of us! I’d seen how the town had rallied after her, had put up posters, had searched.’
‘Searches you could have had called off in a minute.’
‘But I didn’t know exactly where she was back then; and what had that all been for anyway? She left a note, she planned to leave! She wasn’t going to be found in a ditch or in the woods.’
‘She was seventeen and she disappeared, people were worried. And that doesn’t answer my question.’
‘How could I tell you what little I did know without giving up the secret? How could I explain how I knew anything about her going?’