The Mysteries Read online

  “Ah,” she said quietly, searching my face. “And was it all right?”

  I shrugged, then shook my head. “It wasn't like I always thought it would be. I thought I'd be solving this great mystery, and all I did was to find a guy who didn't want to be found.”

  “People are mysteries,” said my mother. “There are no solutions.”

  “File under the Wisdom of Mom,” I said, but not in a nasty way. I scowled at my sandwich and felt my pulse rate speed up. “You don't seem very surprised.” I looked directly at her. “Did you already know where he was?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “I'm sorry, Ian. Your grandmother told me about two years ago.”

  “Why didn't you tell me?”

  “Because . . . you didn't ask. No, really, I mean it. I didn't want to force it on you, stir up painful feelings. You were doing so well at school and all, I thought you'd gotten over it. Especially since I had no intention of getting in touch with him. I decided that if you asked, or were obviously, you know, thinking a lot about it, then I'd tell you.”

  I was shocked, but tried not to show it. How had she not realized that I had never stopped thinking about and wondering what had happened to my dad? It was an obsession with me, and yet she had not known anything about it. As the first shock faded away, I was more relieved. There were plenty of things in my mind that I wouldn't want my mother knowing about. People were mysteries. Thank goodness for that.

  I stuffed the rest of my sandwich into my mouth and, as I chewed, thought about my paternal grandparents. We'd never seen that much of them. They lived, frugally, in Madison, in the same two-bedroom house they'd owned since my father was in grade school. They had never approved of my mother and didn't visit us, their excuse their reluctance to take their deteriorating old Ford out on the highway; but we went to them at least twice a year, and they'd always been very generous to me and Heather at Christmas and on our birthdays. They had seemed as worried and as clueless as us when their only son disappeared.

  “How long did Grandma know?”

  “I didn't ask her that,” said my mother, pulling her crusts apart and nibbling at the cheese.

  I thought of something else from two years ago. “He wasn't at Grandpa's funeral.”

  My mother nodded, looking sad. “He didn't want to meet us. He knew we'd be there. He'd been in Madison with Grandma just the day before. She tried to talk him into staying, but he wouldn't. He wanted her to promise she wouldn't mention that she'd seen him.” She shook her head.

  “So that's when she told you. Has she even met her new grandchildren?”

  “Ian, that's between them. It's none of my business, and I don't care—but I do care about Grandma's feelings, and I don't like seeing her hurt. Joe didn't have to create this big mystery and hurt everybody else just because he'd stopped loving me.”

  “I don't think it was about you,” I said. “I don't think he wanted to be a dad anymore. Or a son. He wanted to disappear out of the world and start all over again, fresh. That's more or less what he said, I think.”

  She nodded as if this was old information, and reached across the table to hold my hand. “Then I hope you know it wasn't about you, either. You're a wonderful person, Ian. Your dad doesn't know what he's lost.”

  After finding my father, I lost all interest in being a detective. For years, just remembering my fantasies of solving mysteries was even more embarrassing than listening to my mother talk about love. Looking for people who didn't want to be found—and, let's face it, that had to be most people who disappeared—was a thankless task, at best.

  5. Owen

  Owen Parfitt had been something of a rogue in his youth. Although safely apprenticed to a tailor, he ran off to be a soldier. But after many years spent roaming the earth, he returned to his origins in the little English village of Shepton Mallet, where he settled down and shared his house with his older sister, Mary, who had never married. And so life went on well enough until, in his late sixties, he had a series of strokes that left him semiparalyzed.

  Tailoring and travel were alike impossible for old Owen now. He was incapable of moving without assistance, a bedridden cripple utterly dependent upon the care of his older sister. Mary herself was past eighty, so she hired Susannah Snook, a young girl from the village, to help her with the nursing, housework, cooking, and other chores.

  The Parfitts' cottage was on the high road out of Shepton Mallet, with the main street of the village running past the end of the garden, so they saw a fair amount of traffic every day as people on foot, on horseback, or in wagons passed by.

  One sunny morning in June 1768, Mary and Susannah carried Owen from his bed and settled him into a chair outside in front of the house. Over his nightdress they draped his old greatcoat—for even on a warm summer's day, old men could feel cold—and they left him there, resting upright in the warm sunshine and gazing at the road.

  He was out of the two women's sight for, at most, a quarter of an hour, while they made his bed, tidied, and aired his room. When Mary returned, she saw that the chair in the front garden was empty, the greatcoat lying on the ground beside it. At once she began to call his name, but there came no reply.

  The alarm was raised and a search begun throughout the village. Haymakers working in a field across the road had seen no sign of the old man, nor had they noticed any visitors calling at the cottage or heard anything untoward. Search parties combed the woods and fields for miles around, witnesses were called for and questioned, but no one had any useful information to offer, and no trace of Owen Parfitt, or clue to his fate, was ever found. Many villagers were of the opinion that old Owen had been carried off by demons, and there was certainly no evidence to say that he hadn't.

  In 1814, a new investigation into the mysterious disappearance of Owen Parfitt was launched. By this time, of course, Mary Parfitt was long dead, as were most people who had known them well. But Susannah Snook still remembered the events of that long-ago June day very clearly, as did some others who had been part of the search parties. During this new investigation, human remains were discovered buried under a wall not far from the Parfitts' cottage; however, upon examination, these were declared to be the bones of a local girl, more recently missing and presumed murdered.

  The investigators also found reports from June 1768 of an elderly man, matching descriptions of Owen Parfitt, seen wandering in the lanes near Frome, more than ten miles from Shepton Mallet. This raised the question of whether or not the old man was totally paralyzed, as was generally believed, or if he would have been capable of walking a bit. Yet, even if he still possessed some power of movement, it seems unlikely he could have walked so far unaided, and unseen, and the mystery of why he should do so, and what happened to him after that evening, remains.

  6. Peri

  When I was alone again, I went to get my long-delayed cup of coffee but found it nearly undrinkable, simmering away on the hot plate. I didn't bother to brew up a fresh pot because I was suddenly ravenous. Even though I'd neglected to get a formal retainer out of Ms. Lensky, I was back in business again, and with that five hundred dollars from my mother, I figured I could afford to treat myself to breakfast at the Turkish-Cypriot café around the corner. I decided to make it a working breakfast and gathered up my phone, notebook, and the folder with details about the missing girl and stashed them inside the capacious leather satchel I'd bought for the purpose years ago when formally launching my career as a finder of missing persons.

  I worked out of my home in a funky, run-down, ethnically mixed area of North London. My house was built originally as a single-family dwelling, but sometime in the 1970s, when most of the bigger houses along the same road were being cut up into flats and bed-sits to suit the needs of a changing population, mine had been reclassified as commercial premises, and the downstairs became a corner shop with the owners living upstairs. But the conversion had been done on the cheap, and in a very halfhearted way: There was no separate entrance to the upstairs rooms, and the s
mall, dark, ancient kitchen remained inconveniently downstairs, separated from the rest of the living quarters by the shop; also, the only toilet was upstairs, separated by a partition wall from the narrow, chilly bathroom.

  When it came up for sale again in the early nineties—at a time when property prices were dropping precipitously—it was an obvious white elephant, neither a family home nor a useful commercial premises, and had to be “competitively priced.” I knew as soon as I saw it that it would suit me very well. It was much cheaper than any of the one-bedroom flats I'd been looking at, and although the council tax was higher on a commercial property, I would save money by not having to rent office space elsewhere. If it was a little out of the way (I admit, I'd had fantasies of hanging my shingle from a picturesquely seedy walk-up in Soho) that didn't matter: I wasn't expecting to be dependent on passing trade, and I was in easy walking distance of both a tube station and a railway line.

  Over the past few years London property prices had been rising steadily until now they were through the roof. Although I'd done absolutely nothing to make my odd little office/home more salable I knew I could sell it for considerably more than twice what I'd paid for it. Local estate agents and property developers had taken to shoving flyers into my letter box on an almost daily basis, tempting me with free estimates and the promise of a quick sale. Whenever I felt gloomy about my financial situation I knew there was an easy way out: I could sell up and move back to America with enough money to make a fresh start.

  But this was not one of those days. I crumpled the latest flyer into a ball without looking at it and tossed it onto the recycling pile before I set the alarm and double-locked the door. It wasn't so much that I had things worth stealing as that I couldn't afford the hassle of having to replace my computer again.

  There were lots of good places to eat in the neighborhood, some of them even cheap. One of my favorites was the Turkish-Cypriot café less than a five-minute walk away. From the outside it didn't look inspiring, being small and starkly decorated, but its charms had grown on me. I liked the laid-back, family attitude, loved the freshly baked Turkish bread and the strong, delicious coffee. Men gathered there at all times of the day to talk to each other or read their newspapers while they smoked cigarettes and sipped numerous cups of the thick black coffee or mint tea. What seemed to be a Turkish radio station was always playing softly in the background, and I rarely heard anyone speak more than a few words of English. I suppose I should have felt out of place there, but I liked being the foreigner, alone in the corner with my English papers or book, surrounded by the incomprehensible buzz of a language and culture I knew nothing about.

  One or two regulars nodded at me when I came in, and the owner seemed pleased, as always, to see me. I ordered coffee and a bacon sandwich on Turkish bread, and settled down at an empty table with the new file.

  The photographs it contained were the first revelation. Peri Lensky was extraordinarily beautiful. In the pictures, at least, there was something almost unearthly about her looks; I wondered that she hadn't been talent-spotted on the street and flown off to become the face of some international cosmetics company. How had someone so stunningly gorgeous managed to stay hidden?

  These weren't studio shots with light used to highlight and conceal, or with flaws airbrushed out; they were just snapshots taken on a summer's day in London.

  One showed Peri with her mother, posing in Trafalgar Square with pigeons clustered around their feet. The daughter loomed over her tiny mother, the amazon with the elf.

  In another, Peri hung on the arm of a young man and laughed into the camera as he gazed sideways at her, clearly besotted.

  Hugh? I peered at the unexceptional profile. He looked thoroughly ordinary, but the boyfriends of gorgeous women generally did, if they weren't hideous gargoyles.

  I went looking through the papers to find out more. He was called Hugh Bell-Rivers, and this hyphenated young personage had two mobile phone numbers. The first connected me with his voice mail, but he answered the second.

  “Bell-Rivers.”

  I introduced myself and explained what I was doing. “Ms. Lensky said you could fill me in on what happened the night Peri disappeared. I'd like to meet and talk with you about that.”

  “Sure. Happy to. Maybe sometime next week?”

  “Today would be better.”

  “That's impossible. I'm sorry, but I'm very busy just now.”

  “I'll come to you. Anytime. If not today, how about tomorrow? It shouldn't take more than an hour.”

  “Look, I'll be happy to help you, but I can't just now. Next week . . .”

  “I can't leave it that long.” His accent and brisk yet languid manner irritated me even more than his double-barreled name. “Ms. Lensky insisted that I had to hear your story first. Which means I'm stuck; I can't even start to work until I've talked to you.”

  He sighed into the phone. “Frankly, I don't see the urgency. What difference does a week make after all this time?”

  “I'm sorry that you're finding this such a chore. Ms. Lensky's going back to America soon, and she'd like some sort of results before she leaves. She thought you'd want to help me. If you won't, of course I'll have to go back to her.”

  Silence. Then another sigh. “Oh, all right. Lunch today. I'll be needing a break then, anyway. I'm in Soho. There's a noodle bar nearby, Kingly Street. Say one o'clock.”

  “One o'clock,” I said agreeably, and was startled to realize he'd ended the call. Well, the hell with that. I reckoned I could track down a noodle bar in Kingly Street without any help from him.

  I put my phone away and turned my attention to the Scottish detective's report. This seemed thorough, if ultimately pointless, as he listed and detailed his failure to find any further trace of Peri Lensky after a last sighting on the day of the phone call, on the road leading away from a campsite in the Scottish Highlands. I worked my way through his compilation of witness statements.

  MRS MORAG BROWN: (IDENTIFIED PERI FROM PHOTOGRAPH)

  It was early evening, around about teatime. I'm not sure of the exact time—you do tend to lose track during your holidays, don't you? And this time of year, it doesn't get dark until really late. This was the last day of May, that's right. It had been a nice day, mostly, very warm, and with a nice bit of sunshine in between the showers. I'd just walked up to the shop to get some soft drinks for the kiddies, and I noticed this girl hanging about by the telephone box.

  She was hard not to notice. Well, she was pretty, and young, and pregnant. And her clothes! It was as if she hadn't noticed she was pregnant, or maybe she didn't have anything better. They certainly weren't maternity clothes, they were stretched all out of shape and didn't fit her properly, much the worse for wear. She wasn't staying on the site—I'd have noticed her before. I thought she looked a bit lost, frankly, so I asked if I could help. I have daughters myself, you know.

  She said she wanted to make a call but she couldn't get the phone to work. I asked her what coin she'd put in, and she said she didn't have any money, but that she wanted to make a collect call, her mother would pay for it. Well, you have to put a coin in to make the phone work at all—I gave her a twenty-pence piece to use. When I saw she'd got through to the operator all right, I went away into the shop—I didn't want to be eavesdropping or anything, you know.

  When I came out, she was still there, and tried to give me back the twenty pence, but I wouldn't have it. I invited her to come back to my caravan for tea; I told her I had a daughter about her age and that she'd be most welcome. Frankly, she looked like she could use a good meal. But she sort of backed away from me, shaking her head. She said she couldn't stay, that she had to get back to her husband. I noticed then that she sounded American. She seemed a bit nervous, and she looked so, well, so ragged that I just came right out with it and asked if she was in some kind of trouble, and could I help.

  She looked surprised then, and she laughed and said no, no trouble—but she wanted to get back, and
she couldn't risk being late. She thanked me again for the coin—she tried to give it back but I made her keep it, poor soul—and she waved me good-bye and walked off down the drive, toward the gates. I didn't see her again.

  WILLIAM MACDOUGALL (IDENTIFIED PERI FROM PHOTOGRAPH)

  Yes, that's her, that's the girl, all right. She wasn't dressed so nice when I saw her—she looked a bit of a scarecrow, really, and she was trudging along the road like she was dead beat. That's why I stopped the car. I only stopped because I thought she was a poor cow—sorry—who needed a lift. It's a long walk from there to anywhere.

  Where? About a mile from the campsite, maybe a bit less. I was staying in Tayvallich. I'd just been down on the beach, parked my car at the campsite because it was convenient. So I was heading back to Tayvallich when I saw her.

  She said, “No thanks,” when I offered her a lift. She said she'd rather walk. Well, I was only trying to be friendly. I left her to it.

  No, I'd never seen her before, or since.

  ANNE MACDONALD (IDENTIFIED PERI FROM PHOTOGRAPHS)

  Yes, that's her, I think. She looks more glam in the photos, though. She was really much more ordinary-looking in real life. And pregnant, of course. I could see she was pregnant from the way she was walking, even from the back, and I told Ewan—that's my husband—to slow down and offer her a ride.

  He asked her where she was going, and she just shook her head without saying anything. So I leaned over and said we could give her a lift to the village—it was about five or six miles away—or farther, as we were going all the way to Lochgilphead. She said no, thank you, she only had a short way to go.

  About a mile farther along the road I noticed a farmhouse that did bed-and-breakfast, so I thought maybe that was where she was going; that seemed to make sense.

  That was all. Only four people had seen Peri on that evening in May, two years ago, all in the space of perhaps an hour, within a few square miles in the middle of nowhere. The Scottish detective had thoughtfully included a photocopied map of the area, with red Xs to mark the spots where Peri had been seen. The campsite was off a single-track road, nine miles from the nearest village. On one side of the road was hilly heathland and forest; on the other, the sea. One obvious explanation for her abrupt disappearance was that she had been traveling by boat with the man she'd referred to as her husband. I imagined a suave, James-Bond-type figure in a dinner jacket, powerful and rich, waiting for Peri to rejoin him on an elegant yacht anchored in a hidden bay somewhere along that rocky coastline. Yet that hardly fit with the ragged girl who didn't have a mobile phone or a credit card, who'd had to beg a coin in order to call her mother collect.