Free The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine Page A

day had been like, with special reference to how upset I was at losing my best friend.
    “Well, really, Jane, I would have thought I was your best friend. I'm sure no one does more for you than I do.”
    That I ignored and went on a bit about Gerry being devastated, a word she uses a lot herself, and poor little Justin. I'ddone the shopping for them, I said, and cooked and now I was exhausted, so if she wouldn't mind I'd ring off. The phone rang again almost immediately and of course I thought it was her, wanting to reprove me for being offhand. It wasn't, it was Gerry.
    The police had been and had told him they had reason to believe that Hebe had been abducted by mistake for someone else, a far more likely victim, the wife of a multimillionaire. That was why the press had gone. This news would be in the newspapers next day and on the television.
    If I could spare the time, would I come up to Irving Road again tomorrow? I hesitated and then I said of course I would. There wouldn't be the excitement there had been today. The media people would now be outside the multimillionaire's place, wherever that was.
    I said I had come down from my high and dropped into the depths, but now I sank even lower. I suppose that unconsciously I'd been thinking, certainly hoping, that Ivor Tesham might have been in some way responsible, but now I knew he couldn't be. It was a real kidnap and the woman they meant to abduct was someone else, someone who maybe looked like Hebe but that was all.
    Why had I said I'd go up to Irving Road again? What was in it for me? The fact was I had nothing else to do and that is true for me on most Sundays. As I lay down in bed again I had another premonition, a very powerful one this time. “Premonition” means something bad to come, though, doesn't it? This wouldn't be bad but maybe a real future for me. Like I often do, I saw it in pictures—one single picture really. I was in the house in Irving Road, in the living room, and Gerry was there sitting in the other armchair. All the photographs he keeps of Hebe about the place had gone and I had a wedding ring on my finger.

7
    I vor was relieved in an entirely unreasonable way. It was as if the crash and the abduction had nothing to do with him but were only something which he, like almost every newspaper reader in the country, had read about. Press attention had shifted to Kelly Mason, to her husband and his millions, to his purchase of a football team; police attention had shifted away from Irving Road, West Hendon, to the Bishops Avenue, Hampstead Garden Suburb. He knew this theory must be false, he knew what had really happened, but it seemed to him only like a heaven-sent reprieve that carried with it a free pardon.
    “I'm off the hook.” He punched the air exultantly. “The worst is over.”
    “Hebe is still dead,” Iris said.
    “I'm well aware of that, thank you.”
    “What exactly were you afraid of, Ivor?”
    “ ‘Afraid' is a strong word,” he said. “I was starting to feel increasingly uncomfortable about the possibility of my little adventure coming to light. In some gossip column, for instance.”He gets pompous and talks like a politician when he is excited. “In some diary piece. If I'd gone to the police, as you helpfully suggested, that's what would have happened. Now, you see, anything like that would have been quite unnecessary. It wasn't Hebe they meant to abduct. It was this Kelly Mason.”
    He placed the scathing stress on “Kelly” that up-and-coming Tory notables always do put on names they perceive as working class. Iris looked at him sadly. She was more affected by all this than I was, but then she loved him a whole lot more than I did. She shook her head.
    “But you know that isn't true. They did abduct Hebe. It may have been a mock abduction but it was aimed at Hebe, not Kelly Mason. Don't you have to get that clear, whatever the police and the media may think?”
    Ivor had turned up without warning halfway through