afternoon. She had never been seen or heard of again. There were no witnesses to her departure, but Gloria had spoken on the telephone to her sister, Sheila Bowen, at about midday. Gloria had asked Sheila for a recipe for pork and apple casserole.
When Sheila phoned back a quarter of an hour later after searching out the recipe book there was no reply, though Gloria had been expecting the call.
Gloria’s six-year-old son Billy went uncollected from school; her car lay untouched in the driveway. Gloria’s makeup was spread out in front of her dressing-table mirror as if she had been interrupted in the act of applying it. Gloria had withdrawn no large sums of cash, nor did she pack any clothes, she had left her Valium and contraceptive pills in the bathroom cabinet. Her keys, purse and reading glasses were still in her handbag, which lay open on the bed she shared with her husband. Her passport lay undisturbed at the bottom of her underwear drawer. There was no sign of an accident or a struggle, no note; no woman was discovered wandering the local lanes with amnesia. Mrs Gloria Noon had simply disappeared.
Sheila told police that she and her sister had talked of more than recipes that morning.
Gloria had finally decided to leave her husband, taking her young son with her. According to Sheila the boy was the only reason Gloria had stayed in her marriage.
It was confirmed that Gloria had been seen two weeks earlier by the casualty department of her local hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. The doctor who’d examined her had written in his notes that he considered her injuries more consistent with an assault than a fall. Her sister claimed that Gloria had been beaten by her husband and that this beating, the most recent in a long series, was the reason Gloria had finally decided to leave — that and the encouragement she’d received from her lover.
Gloria had never named the man she was leaving Bill senior for, fearing the danger he’d be in if her husband discovered his identity and knowing that divorce courts looked unsympathetically on women who indulged in extramarital affairs, even the wives of dubious businessmen who made easy with their fists.
'She wouldn’t have done anything that interfered with her chance of getting custody of Billy,' her sister had insisted. 'And she would never have left him.'
But of course the affair had jeopardised Gloria’s chance of custody. And she had most certainly left her son. The question was, had she left voluntarily?
If you could hang a man on hearsay, Bill Noon would have mounted the gallows in double-quick time. But he’d insisted that with the exception of his abandoned son he was the most confused and upset of anyone involved. He denied any knowledge of an affair and insisted that though they ‘had their ups and downs like any married couple,' he knew of no plan to leave him. Gloria liked a drop, they both did, and once or twice he’d raised his hand but he’d never have seriously hurt her. The gin and not his fists were to blame for her fall and her bruises. He disputed his sister-inlaw’s account, accusing her of being jealous of Gloria’s lifestyle and of actively wanting their marriage to fail. He poured scorn on the idea that his wife would confide anything in her sister. He even slandered the recipe for pork and apple casserole.
Though the newspapers recorded Bill Noon’s denials it was clear whose side they took, even after he had posted a substantial reward for news of his wife. Bill Noon stared out from their photos, photogenic as a Kray twin hard man, while Gloria’s sister, Sheila, sat dignified in full suburban bloom, or was pictured working honestly and industriously in her husband’s outfitting shop.
For a while Gloria was sighted almost as regularly as Lord Lucan. A holidaymaker thought he saw her walking along a beach in Majorca. She’d dyed her hair brown and was holding the hand of a thin aristocratic-looking man. She was seen on a bus in Margate, wearing a headscarf of the kind favoured by the queen. A hiker had passed Gloria walking along a cliff-top in Wales. She’d looked troubled and they’d thought of asking if she was OK.
It was only later that it occurred to them who she was. What attraction coastlines had for the disappeared Gloria Noon was never explored in the press.
After a while the sightings of Gloria diminished, though over the years people continued to claim to have glimpsed her. Generally after the press had resurrected her story, something that happened whenever a respectable married woman went missing.
Though, unlike Gloria, these women always seemed to turn up, in some form.
Gloria Noon had become her disappearance, a bundle of newspaper clippings, a police file, a chapter in true crime books and an entire Pan paperback, The Friday the Thirteenth Vanishing. The police denied her case was closed, but admitted there was little they could do with no evidence, no witnesses and no body.
The most spectacular resurrection of the publicity surrounding the case had come with Bill Noon senior’s remarriage twelve years after his first wife’s disappearance. Several newspapers had run a copy of the wedding photo. Bill junior acted as best man. He stood at the front of the group photograph, handsome face stiff and unreadable. And if you looked closely, it was possible to spot a younger, thinner James Montgomery in the back row of the bravely smiling wedding party, grinning like a man who’d just come into a good thing.
I took all the clippings I had managed to get copied about the disappearance of Bill’s mother and laid them across the floor of my room. Then I took out the map and the photograph that I’d filched from Montgomery and laid them side-by-side. I lifted the photograph and stared at the newspaper held in Montgomery’s hand. The print was small, but it was still possible to read the headline and the date, 13th March 1970, the day of Gloria’s disappearance. I looked again at the map and felt certain that this was the last resting place of Gloria Noon.
Bill had been nothing to me, Sam was a friend that I hadn’t seen for a year and Gloria a woman who vanished when I was still a child. I didn’t owe them any debt and nothing that I could do would bring them back. But maybe I held the solution to their deaths, and perhaps in helping to bring them justice I would find some peace of my own. Montgomery was out there somewhere, eager to get his hands on evidence that might damn him. Was I in mourning for what I’d done in Berlin? Or just a coward, hiding from a man who’d been playing dirty since before I was born? I’d been spending a long time on my decline. This could be my chance to redeem myself or go out Butch-Cassidy-and-theSundance-Kid-style, in a blaze of glory.
I left everything lying the way that it was, washed my face, locked the door, turned out the light and went to bed.
The cuttings were still splayed across the floor when I woke the following midmorning.
I stepped over them, mindful not to stand on any of the photographs of Gloria and Bill Noon, the laughing wedding guests or the carefully coiffured sister, then fumbled in the dressing table drawer until I found an unopened pack of playing cards and slid away the red scarf I’d used to cover the mirror. I leaned in close and looked at myself properly for the first time in months. My face was drink-bloated and unshaven, my eyes puffy behind their glasses. I rubbed a hand across my bristles, wondering if the old William was lost forever, then pulled up a chair, slit open the pack and threw the jokers to one side. I shuffled the deck and started to perform some basic sleights of hand. My
