search, Reg. Call off this “tracing”, as you put it. Leave it to Subaqua. They’re highly competent and they’ve reinforcements coming in from Myringham. I’m assured by their boss - incidentally, a fellow Rotarian - that they won’t rest until they’ve found them. If they’re there - and they are - they’ll find them.’
If they’re there . . . Since they weren’t, couldn’t be, time was going by, anything could have happened. He went home, asked Dora, who had been taking and apparently excelled at a computer course, if she could get into a website on the Internet for him.
‘I should think so.’
‘It’s called www.langlearn.com. And when you’ve found it perhaps you’d give me a call so I can look at it.’
‘Darling,’ she said indulgently, ‘I don’t have to do that. I can print it out.’ She sought for language he would understand. ‘It will be like a book or a newspaper. You’ll see.’
It was. ‘Page 1 of 2’ it said at the top and, in Times New Roman type, thirty-six point: ‘Fantastic French with Joanna Troy.’ The portrait photograph was smudgy. It might have been almost any young woman. There was a page of text, most of it incomprehensible to Wexford, not because it was in French, it wasn’t, but because of the cyber-speak which he couldn’t follow. A column down the left-hand side, extending on to page 2, offered twenty or thirty options including All the Words You Want, Verbs Made Easy, Books You Need and Instant Chat. You highlighted the one you wanted. Dora had apparently highlighted All the Words You Want for him and downloaded page 1 (of 51). It held an eye-opening vocabulary but not a word he could ever imagine using. Here the student could learn the French for pop music, ‘house’ and ‘garage’, the kind of drinks teenagers like, types of cigarette and, he suspected, types of cannabis, the translation of ‘miniskirt’, ‘tank top’, ‘distressed leather’ and ‘kitten heels’, the when, where and how of buying condoms and how a French girl would ask for the morning-after pill.
Did it tell him anything about Joanna Troy? Maybe it did. That, for instance, she had a grasp of what people of the age of her former students required from the Internet, that she was uninhibited, unshocked by drug-taking and the free availability of contraceptive measures. That she was what, in his day, used to be called ‘with it’ and in his father’s ‘on the ball’. She might not be a fashionable dresser herself but she knew about teenagers’ clothes. And it was hardly part of his self-imposed brief to enquire why she assumed that everyone who wanted to learn French must be under eighteen and conversant with a language far more obscure than that she was aiming to teach.
But how very different from Katrina Dade she must be showed in all the words of this text he could under stand and perhaps even more in those he couldn’t. Did it also show that, her own age more or less halfway between theirs and that of their children, she had common ground with those children? Far more in common than with Katrina who would have defined ‘garage’, he was sure, as somewhere you kept a car and ‘spliff’ as an expostulatory noise made by a character in a comic strip.
And why did he feel, now more than ever, that the answer to all this would lie in the reason for the friend ship between Katrina Dade and Joanna Troy? ‘Whatever that might be. Katrina’s motives were obvious enough. She was flattered by the attentions of a woman younger and cleverer than herself. Besides, she was what the psychotherapists, what Wexford’s Sylvia, would call ‘needy’. But what about Joanna’s purpose? Perhaps it will emerge, he thought, as he put the print out into his pocket.
Chapter 6
According to the Environment Agency all the ground in mid-Sussex, all the south of England, come to that, was waterlogged. Even when the rain stopped there would be
If they’re there . . . Since they weren’t, couldn’t be, time was going by, anything could have happened. He went home, asked Dora, who had been taking and apparently excelled at a computer course, if she could get into a website on the Internet for him.
‘I should think so.’
‘It’s called www.langlearn.com. And when you’ve found it perhaps you’d give me a call so I can look at it.’
‘Darling,’ she said indulgently, ‘I don’t have to do that. I can print it out.’ She sought for language he would understand. ‘It will be like a book or a newspaper. You’ll see.’
It was. ‘Page 1 of 2’ it said at the top and, in Times New Roman type, thirty-six point: ‘Fantastic French with Joanna Troy.’ The portrait photograph was smudgy. It might have been almost any young woman. There was a page of text, most of it incomprehensible to Wexford, not because it was in French, it wasn’t, but because of the cyber-speak which he couldn’t follow. A column down the left-hand side, extending on to page 2, offered twenty or thirty options including All the Words You Want, Verbs Made Easy, Books You Need and Instant Chat. You highlighted the one you wanted. Dora had apparently highlighted All the Words You Want for him and downloaded page 1 (of 51). It held an eye-opening vocabulary but not a word he could ever imagine using. Here the student could learn the French for pop music, ‘house’ and ‘garage’, the kind of drinks teenagers like, types of cigarette and, he suspected, types of cannabis, the translation of ‘miniskirt’, ‘tank top’, ‘distressed leather’ and ‘kitten heels’, the when, where and how of buying condoms and how a French girl would ask for the morning-after pill.
Did it tell him anything about Joanna Troy? Maybe it did. That, for instance, she had a grasp of what people of the age of her former students required from the Internet, that she was uninhibited, unshocked by drug-taking and the free availability of contraceptive measures. That she was what, in his day, used to be called ‘with it’ and in his father’s ‘on the ball’. She might not be a fashionable dresser herself but she knew about teenagers’ clothes. And it was hardly part of his self-imposed brief to enquire why she assumed that everyone who wanted to learn French must be under eighteen and conversant with a language far more obscure than that she was aiming to teach.
But how very different from Katrina Dade she must be showed in all the words of this text he could under stand and perhaps even more in those he couldn’t. Did it also show that, her own age more or less halfway between theirs and that of their children, she had common ground with those children? Far more in common than with Katrina who would have defined ‘garage’, he was sure, as somewhere you kept a car and ‘spliff’ as an expostulatory noise made by a character in a comic strip.
And why did he feel, now more than ever, that the answer to all this would lie in the reason for the friend ship between Katrina Dade and Joanna Troy? ‘Whatever that might be. Katrina’s motives were obvious enough. She was flattered by the attentions of a woman younger and cleverer than herself. Besides, she was what the psychotherapists, what Wexford’s Sylvia, would call ‘needy’. But what about Joanna’s purpose? Perhaps it will emerge, he thought, as he put the print out into his pocket.
Chapter 6
According to the Environment Agency all the ground in mid-Sussex, all the south of England, come to that, was waterlogged. Even when the rain stopped there would be
Similar Books
