Free Murder Takes the Stage by Amy Myers

back.’
    This didn’t tie in with what Ken had told them. Harold was obviously still alive, and Georgia wondered what his side of the story would be.
    â€˜What happened to the little girl?’ Peter enquired. ‘Didn’t she give him a reason for living?’
    â€˜Joan’s parents took Pamela. They wouldn’t give her back even when Tom was acquitted. He was unemployed, so he couldn’t insist.’
    â€˜How did you know Tom had disappeared?’ Peter’s voice was quiet, and Georgia realized Rick was on his mind as well as on hers. They had had an illogical but never-ending niggle of guilt that they had reported Rick’s disappearance too late.
    â€˜Tom said he’d got the offer of a job in Eastbourne. That would have been about October or November in 1953. It was a job in pantomime, he said. Off he went, but he never came back.’
    Georgia saw her lips tremble again. ‘You must have been broken-hearted for the second time. It was hard on you.’
    â€˜It was. I married Harold a year or two later – I did it only to get over Tom’s going. It was worse than the case itself for me. He just walked out, without telling me or even leaving a note behind him. That’s why I know he’s not dead, you see,’ she added confidently.
    That happy smile wasn’t assumed, Georgia thought uneasily – Cherry really did believe this.
    â€˜He would have told me, you see, or left a note. Tom loved me,’ Cherry continued serenely. ‘I’ve got a lock of his hair on my dressing table. I look at it every day, so I know he’ll be back.’
    â€˜But where has he been in the meantime?’ Peter asked.
    â€˜He made a new life for himself, that’s what happened. For my sake, or so he thought. But now we’re older – he’d be eighty-six – he’ll come back. He always said we’d die in old age in each other’s arms. So I know he will come back soon. It’s just  . . .’ Her voice faltered. ‘I’d like to know when. And where he is.’
    Like Rick, Georgia thought dully. Like Rick. Before they had set out, Peter had broken the news to her that the 1994 festival programme at Guidel had no singers in it. That did not mean Rick and Miss Blondie had not been present, but as the police had covered that area in their search, they had agreed to discount Guidel as a lead. She and Peter were no further forward, and Rick became a smaller and smaller figure as he walked away briskly from them along that country road. Her nightmare.
    Talk of work was banned from Medlars itself, except on rare occasions sanctioned by both parties. Unfortunately Georgia could dream up no way of keeping thoughts of work out of her mind. Family talk either of Luke’s relations or of Peter’s sister Gwen, who now lived at Wymbourne between Canterbury and Dover with her second husband Terry, or of Gwen’s son by her first marriage, Charlie Bone, only took so much time, and setting the world to rights was too tough a task for evenings after a day’s work. Usually, the boundary was respected, but when Georgia returned from Broadstairs she found Luke in the Medlars’ living room engrossed with sales figures.
    As a result, vague worries about Tom Watson refused to disappear. The meeting with Cherry had both helped and hindered her. Cherry was a dear but unfortunately so fixed in her own prejudices over Tom that her contribution to the investigation was not going to be as significant as she and Peter had hoped. On the other hand, the meeting had brought the case to life in a different way. Cherry had been there at the time, and therefore what had been history could now be brought alive in a way that even Brian James could not achieve. But where next?
    â€˜Supper might help,’ she said aloud, breaking the silence.
    Startled, Luke looked up from his laptop, caught her look of reproof and laughed. ‘Sorry.