her nose pierced. She was a different person.'
'What colour did she dye it?' we both asked.
'Bright red.' Ah, well, she still had six years to go purple.
'Was there anything else?' I wondered.
'Not really,' Mrs. Holmes replied. 'We drifted apart after that. I knew I had to work hard, and I didn't want to let my parents down. I know it's corny, but they made sacrifices to send me to university, and I wasn't as gifted as Melissa. I thought she wasted her talents, and to be honest, I grew to dislike her.'
'Did she and this Kingston become a couple?' Dave asked.
'For a while,' Mrs. Holmes answered, 'and then…' She covered her face with her hands and began to laugh uncontrollably. 'Oh my goodness!' she exclaimed as she recovered. 'I don't know if I should tell you…'
Her laughter was infectious. 'If you don't,' I said, smiling, 'we'll just have to arrest you and take you to the station to make a statement.'
She blew her nose on a tissue and concealed it somewhere in the folds of her skirt. 'It was awful,' she declared, but her expression said otherwise.
'What happened?' I asked.
'We went to a party at Nick Kingston's flat. It must have been after Christmas, because I'd taken my father's car back down there after the holiday. It was a Morris Minor, and he said I'd have more use for it than him. After that, I was invited to a lot more parties, because I was good for a lift. I remember! It was to watch a moon landing, that was it! Apollo 13, the one that had problems. We were all interested, history was being made, but Kingston knew everything about it. He was a complete show-off. Would you like some more tea?'
We would. She refilled our cups and I invited her to continue.
'Kingston was awful to Melissa. They'd seen a lot of each other up to then, but I could see he was deliberately ignoring her and chasing another girl. Melissa took her revenge by latching on to poor Mo.'
'Mo?'
That smile came back, but wistful this time. 'That's right, short for Mobo Dlamini. He was from Swaziland, that's in South Africa, and a lovely person. His father or grandfather was the king, and he came over here to study law.'
'Could you spell it, please?' Dave asked, and noted it down.
'I went home just as it was breaking dawn,' Mrs. Holmes continued, 'but Melissa didn't come with me. I heard her and Mo arrive much later. Their giggles and antics woke me up. About lunchtime I had my revenge. There was a knock at the door and who should I find there but Melissa's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Youngman. They pushed past me and marched up to her room. Can you imagine their reactions? Not only was their darling daughter in bed with a man, but he was a black man. It was awful. I heard most of it and Mo told me the rest. They stormed out and drove away, and I don't think she saw them again. I gave Mo some aspirin and some breakfast and took him home.'
'This was early 1970?' I asked.
'Yes.'
'Melissa's mother died of an overdose in August of that year,' I said.
'Oh no,' Janet Holmes sighed. 'The poor woman.'
'Melissa sounds a right little charmer,' Dave declared. 'I'm not surprised you disliked her.'
'What happened to them all?' I asked.
She took a deep breath and thought for a few seconds. 'That was the end of our friendship, if you could call it that. I moved out and concentrated on my studies. Melissa didn't do the second year and I haven't heard a whisper of her until now. Mo joined a firm of solicitors in London and married an English girl. We kept in touch until I left university, but I don't know what happened to him.'
'And Kingston?' I prompted.
She hesitated before shaking her head and saying: 'I don't know.'
My tea was cold but I finished it off. Putting the cup down I said:
'You wouldn't happen to have any photographs, would you?'
Our lucky streak stayed with us. She sat upright, stretching her spine to its full extent, and said: 'Why didn't I think of that? Of course I have, somewhere.'
'We'd be grateful if you could find them.'
She said it would take a few minutes, but she knew where they should be if we didn't mind waiting. We passed the time by having another scone each and I studied the cross-section of the beastie above the fireplace. Seeing one of them down the pan would ruin your morning.
It took a little longer than we expected, and she had a smudge of dust on her nose when she returned, explaining that they were in the loft and she rarely went up there. 'Here we are,' she said, laying an album on the table. It said 'Essex' on the cover in ornate lettering.
There were only four that were relevant to our inquiry. Melissa, Mo and Mrs. Holmes, or Miss Wilson as she was then, were in self-conscious poses with several other young people in the various stages of inebriation. 'Which one is you?' I'd asked after she'd pointed to Melissa on three of them.
'There,' she said, 'and there,' indicating a slim girl with long straight hair.
'You look like Julie Felix,' I said.
She blushed and said: 'I did a reasonable impersonation of her with the guitar, when pressed.'
'And that must be Mo.'
'A brilliant deduction, my dear Watson,' she replied. He was the only black person in the photographs.
'Elementary, Holmes,' I said, on cue, and she gave me a wistful smile, as if I'd stumbled into a private joke that she hadn't heard for a long time.
The pictures weren't the great breakthrough we'd hoped they might be.
They were small, two and a quarter inches square at a guess, and black and white. The quality was excellent, but the poses were informal and not much use for identification purposes.
'Can we borrow these?' I asked.
'Yes, of course.'
'Is Kingston in any?' Dave wondered.
'No. He took them, but would never let anybody else handle his precious camera. It was the same as the first men on the moon used, he claimed. Another of his boasts. He did us all a set of contact prints, but would charge us for enlargements, if we wanted them. He wasn't famous for his generosity, just the opposite. Photography was one of his hobbies.'
'Along with witchcraft,' Dave suggested.
'Yes, and keep-fit and rock climbing. He was into everything. He was an interesting person, in a way, but weird with it. And slimy. I didn't like him, either.' She laughed again and said: 'I'm awful, aren't I?'
I assured her she wasn't and thanked her for everything. We placed our cups on the tray and I held the door for her as we walked through into the kitchen. Outside, there was a table on the lawn, with one chair against it, and the grass had been half-cut and then abandoned. 'Do you know where Melissa is?' Mrs. Holmes asked.
'We believe she's in the United States,' I replied.
'I've always thought I'd read about her one day,' she said. 'She was a remarkable girl, but after that episode with her parents I decided she was heartless, capable of anything. Nothing Melissa did would surprise me.'
'You've dust on your nose,' I said, smiling.
'A talented lady,' Dave commented as we rejoined the Al.
'Mmm. And capable of anything, it would appear.'
'Who?'
'Melissa.'
'I meant Mrs. Holmes.'
'Yes, she's a clever woman.'
'And nice, too.'
'What are you getting at?' I asked.
'Nothing, but you could do worse.'
'She can't cook,' I replied.
'I suspect she was being modest, and that's what takeaways are for.'
