endlessly in a voice he had not known a human being to be capable of, as she drowned in her loss, and he remained in a sort of paralysis, unable to do or say anything to save her. Thank God for the policeman. It had been he who threw her a line she could grab hold of, he who hauled her in with his next question.
‘The bed had been slept in, though?’
The noise of his words reached her. Dazed, she seemed to come to herself, and nodded. In a voice that was her own again, though weak with exhaustion, she said, ‘Ruby put her to bed. Our nursery maid.’
Then she had lapsed into silence and Vaughan had taken over the narrative.
‘Slow down, Sir, if you don’t mind,’ the fellow had said, as he bent over his notebook, pencil in hand, copying it all down like a zealous schoolboy. ‘Start that bit again, would you?’ Every so often he stopped them, read back what he had down, and they corrected him, remembered details they had left out, discovered discrepancies in what they both knew, compared notes to get it right. Any detail might be the one to bring her back. Hours it had taken, to get down the events of a few minutes.
He had written to his father in New Zealand.
‘No, don’t,’ Helena had protested. ‘What’s the point in upsetting him, when she’ll be home tomorrow, or the day after?’
But he wrote the letter. He remembered the account they had given to the policeman and based his explanation on that. He wrote it out carefully. The letter contained all the facts of the disappearance. Unknown villains came in the night, the letter said. They put up a ladder and entered the house by the nursery window; they left, taking the child with them. New paragraph: Though a ransom demand was received early the following morning and the ransom was paid, our daughter has not been returned to us. We are looking. Everyone is doing their utmost and we will not rest until she is found. The police are pursuing the river gypsies and will search their boats. I shall send further news as soon as there is some.
There was none of the breathlessness. No painful gasps for breath. The horror of it was quite excised. At his desk, less than forty-eight hours after it had happened, he had made his account: the letters arranged themselves into words, regularly aligned, to make sentences and then paragraphs, in which the loss of his daughter was contained. In two informative pages it was done.
When Anthony Vaughan finished the letter, he read it through. Did it say everything that needed to be said? It said everything that could be said. When he was satisfied that it could say no more, he sealed it and rang for the maid, who took it for the post.
That brief and dry account, which he had reused countless times for the benefit of his business associates and other semi-strangers, was the one he brought out now. Though he had not used it for months, he found that he still had it word for word. It took less than a minute to lay the matter before the woman with the grey eyes.
He came to the end of the story and took a mouthful of water from the glass beside him. It had the unexpected and very refreshing taste of cucumber.
Mrs Constantine looked at him with her unwavering, kind look. Something seemed suddenly wrong to him. There was usually stunned shock, a clumsy attempt to console, to say the right thing, or else embarrassed silence that he filled with some remark to redirect the conversation. None of this happened.
‘I see,’ she said. And then – nodding, as if she really did see, but what was there to see? Nothing, surely – ‘Yes. And what about your wife?’
‘My wife?’
‘When you first arrived you told me you had come to seek my help about your wife.’
‘Ah. So I did.’
He felt that he needed to trace a long path back to arriving at the house, that first exchange of words with Mrs Constantine, though it could not have been much more than a quarter of an hour ago. He worked backwards through various obstacles of time and memory, rubbing his eyes, and found what it was he was here for.
‘It’s like this, you see. My wife is – quite naturally – inconsolable. Understandable in the circumstances. She thinks of nothing except our daughter’s return. Her