‘Tell me the address. I’m perfectly able to travel.’
‘We wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Doreen, taking a more assertive line. ‘What if you had another blackout? Look, I know you want to be independent. So would I. We’re like that, aren’t we, you and I? Believe me, Roz, you need someone to keep an eye on you, at least until we know you’re back to normal.’
‘Doreen’s right,’ Imogen weighed in, in her role as social worker. ‘There’s nothing like the support of one’s family.’
Doreen said, ‘You must speak to Mummy as soon as possible and put her mind at rest. We can ring her from the place where we’re staying.’
Imogen said, ‘You can call from here. There’s a payphone downstairs.’
‘Let’s do it now,’ said Doreen.
All this had happened at a pace too fast for Rose – or Roz -to take in. She didn’t yet feel comfortable with this stepsister who wanted to take her over and she balked at the prospect of phoning a mother she didn’t recognise. Naively she had imagined being reunited with her family would solve her problems, restore the life she had been severed from, but she was discovering that she didn’t want to be claimed by these people she still regarded as strangers. She needed more time to adjust.
She said to Doreen, ‘You call if you like. I’d rather not speak to her yet’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d feel uncomfortable and it would show in my voice. You can tell her what happened. Say I haven’t got my memory back yet.’
Doreen’s expression tightened. ‘I think you ought to speak to her.’
Imogen was nodding.
Ada backed her friend. ‘Jesus, if it was my Mum, all she’d want to know is that I was alive and kicking. But if I sounded like a zombie on the end of the line, she’d go bananas.’ She told Doreen, ‘You cover for your sister, love. Phone’s on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. You can’t miss it.’
Ada’s air of authority succeeded. Doreen Jenkins sighed, shrugged and left the room.
Ada asked Rose, ‘What’s up, kiddo? You ought to be over the moon. Don’t you take to your long-lost sister?’
‘That’s immaterial,’ said Rose.
‘In other words, she’s a right cow.’
‘Ada, I didn’t say that!’
‘The trouble is, we can’t choose our families,’ said Ada. ‘We’re stuck with the beauties we’ve got. I can talk. The Shaftsbury mob could teach the Borgias tricks. You managed to escape yours for a bit, and now they’ve caught up with you.’
Imogen, as usual, tried to compensate for Ada’s outspokenness. ‘I found her pleasant to deal with, and there can’t be any doubt. She’s made a special trip from London to find you.’
‘I know.’
‘The photos clinch it, don’t they?’
Rose folded her arms. ‘It’s hard to put into words the way I feel. I’m sure she’s doing this from the best motive. I suppose I’m panicking a bit. Or pig-headed. Part of me doesn’t want to be taken over. You see, I feel perfectly well in myself. I could manage. I can manage, here, with Ada.’
‘What you’re overlooking,’ said Imogen, with a hard edge to her voice, ‘is that you’ve been managing with the help of Avon Social Services. That was fine while you were homeless and without family. Now, you see, the rules have altered. I can’t let you stay here when your own people are willing to take you back.’
‘You’re kicking me out, in other words.’
‘I’ve got my job to do.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Why put it off until tomorrow? Your sister’s offering you a comfortable room somewhere.’
Ada put a beefy arm around Rose’s shoulders. ‘Life’s a bummer. Like we said, petal, whatever, wherever. Let me know when you get home. Directly, right?’
Rose nodded.
‘In fact, I’ll give you one of my cards.’ Ada went to the cupboard beside her bed.
‘Your said Imogen.
Ada had been full of surprises from the start, but the idea of a homeless woman having cards to hand out was the most incredible yet.
The expression on Imogen’s face was priceless.
‘You can have one, too, if you like,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve got about two thousand.’ What she had was a handful of postcards. ‘Aerial views of Bath. Lovely, aren’t they?’
Imogen said, ‘Ada, you’re the limit’
Ada gave her a disdainful look, ‘They’re legit. I got them out of a skip, sweetie. They’re all fuzzy. Some cock- up with the printing. They were being chucked out. How many do you want?’
Imogen shook her head.
Rose told Ada, ‘You’ve been more than a good friend. You’ve kept me sane.’
‘Send me one of these as soon as you get back to Hounslow, right?’ said Ada, putting a bunch of them in her hand. ‘And when you’ve got yourself together again, come and see me. I’ll be here if I’m not doing another stretch – and if I am I’d still appreciate a visit.’
Rose couldn’t speak any more. She picked a Sainsbury’s bag off the back of a chair and started putting her few possessions into it.
Twelve
The farm ‘at Tormarton’ turned out to be closer to Acton Turville than Tormarton, Diamond only discovered after cruising the lanes for three-quarters of an hour. This was a corner of the county he seldom visited, unless you could call racing through on the motorway a visit. On this bleak October afternoon, contending with patches of mist, he concluded that if any stretch of countryside could absorb a three-lane motorway without appreciable loss of character, it was this. The two people he met and asked for directions said they couldn’t help. Locals both, they hadn’t heard of a farmer called Gladstone. When eventually he found the farm (luckily spotting a police vehicle at the end of a mud track) he had no difficulty in understanding how the body had lain undiscovered for up to a week. The stone cottage looked derelict. The outbuildings were overgrown with a mass of soggy Old Man’s Beard, its hairy awns, silver in high summer, now as brown as if the Old Man smoked sixty a day.
The remoteness of the place meant that he could not in all conscience tell Wigfull that he merely happened to be passing. Instead he gave no explanation at all when he hailed the party of diggers.
‘Any progress, John?’
If Dracula himself had stepped out of the mist Wigfull could not have been more startled.
‘I said how’s it going?’
‘What are you…?’
‘Is there any progress?’
‘If shifting half a ton of soil is progress, yes,’ Wigfull succeeded in saying.
‘But you haven’t found anything?’
‘If you insist on standing there,’ said Wigfull, ‘you’ll get your shoes dirty.’ It sounded more like a threat than a warning. He was more sensibly clad than Diamond, in gumboots and overalls.
Diamond took a step back. Perhaps to make the point for Wigfull, one of the men at work in the hole deposited a chunk of soil where the big detective had been standing.
Pre-empting the next question, Wigfull said, ‘It’s an exploratory dig. We’re keeping an open mind.’
‘Sensible. How deep do you intend to go?’
‘When we come to the end of the loose stuff, we stop.’
‘Sounds as if you’re almost there.’
‘Possibly.’ Alerted to the fact that this was the critical point in the excavation, Wigfull bent over the hole and
