The Vanishment by Jonathan Aycliffe Page B

Trevorrow had not been a popular man. He was notorious for underpaying his farm laborers, and abrupt dismissals for small misdemeanors had always been the rule on his lands. The policeman visited the house himself and was shown around by Agnes, but there had been no sign of a child or a child's belongings in any of the rooms he had entered.

    Sarah's parents came down to pay me a visit on the nineteenth. We had a tense meeting that all but ended in accusations of my having done away with Sarah, and I found it hard to restrain myself from striking her father. He was the same sniveling little brute he had always been. I had never learned to love, much less to respect him. Her mother, whom I still called Mrs. Trevor to her face, wore her sour, saintly expression throughout, wringing her thin hands and muttering platitudes. She left in tears. I had no comfort for them. Sarah was missing, probably dead: that was all I knew.
    I did not tell them anything about Petherick House or any of the things that had happened there. To have done so would only have served to confirm their suspicions. I imagine they would have demanded that Raleigh be taken off the case, just when I needed him most.
    He wrote to me again, a week after that first letter. There was no fresh information, he said. All his trails had dried up, he was beginning to lose hope again. The Yorkshire police had drawn a blank with Richard Adderstone. He had been unable to tell them anything of value. Raleigh wondered if I thought it worthwhile for him to travel north in order to interview Adderstone in person.
    The letter was strange, written in a crabbed, obsessive hand, with tall, fencelike letters strangely spaced.
I go to Petherick House every day now [he wrote] though I never enter. It is very quiet there. The leaves have started to fall in the garden. The house is sad, and at times angry. I walk down to the cliff top and look out across the sea. Sometimes wind crosses it. There are gulls in the garden, and at times their crying reminds me of a child in tears. When I look back at the house from there, I can see rows of windows. Sometimes I think I am being watched.
Last night I dreamed of your wife, Sarah. She has been in my dreams for seven weeks now, almost every night. I recognize her from the photograph you left. She never speaks to me. She is constantly silent, and she stares at me with dreaming eyes. If she spoke to me, what would she say? Do you know? Can you guess?
    No, I could not guess. We had never been that close, Sarah and I. We had loved one another, but I had never learned what was in her heart, I had never penetrated that deeply. And now it was too late. One thing, however, I did not understand. It made me bitter. Why Raleigh? Why not me?

    Dreams were not enough. Work was not enough. The long dead weeks dragged unbearably. Autumn came like a weight. I had no focus for my life or thoughts, no way of closing what was past. My one consolation was Rachel. During those early-autumn weeks, Susan was much preoccupied with work. There had been riots in Birmingham and Bradford, followed by exchanges on the floor of the House on the need to clamp down harder on the extreme right. An antifascist demonstration in Manchester had ended in the death of a student. His killers were still at large. One of the national dailies asked Susan to do a short series, then a major Sunday asked her to travel around the riot scenes with a photographer. Rachel became my exclusive charge for days at a time.
    We watched television together. Postman Pat, Juniper Jungle, Jackanory. I told her about the programs I had watched when I was a child. My favorites had been Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men. Rachel fell about laughing when I did my voices for Weed or for Bill speaking to Slowcoach the Tortoise: "Huddo, Sluggalug.” I made her breakfast, lunch, and late tea, which we ate together in the kitchen. When I needed to work, she would play silently with her dolls or watch a video. I