Free Missing From Home by Mary Burchell

find if they have got her address.”
    “I’d leave it until after breakfast if I were you,” said Marilyn, with a surreptitious, anxious glance at the clock. “If that driver hasn’t reported for duty yet they won’t have the information, and you’ll only get more and more jumpy and frustrated if you have to keep on calling. Give it a little longer, Mother.”
    “You’re probably right.” Clare smiled faintly and ruffled her daughter’s hair. “You’re such a sensible child, Mari.”
    Feeling very guilty, Marilyn muttered something about getting up, and her mother went away.
    Greg arrived almost as they sat down to breakfast, and in the end it was he who telephoned to Harwich. The relieved expression which spread over his face almost immediately told Clare and Marilyn that he had the precious information, even before he rang off and exclaimed,
    “All right! I’ve got it. It’s a small private hotel. He couldn’t remember the number, but has given me the street. And he remembered the unusual bracelet she was wearing, because it caught in her handbag strap as she was paying the fare.”
    He thankfully accepted the cup of coffee Clare put in front of him, and then examined afresh the letter which she had shown him as soon as he arrived.
    “It’s desperately uninformative, isn’t it?” he frowned. “Not a hint of plans or reasons—or even difficulties.”
    “Mother thinks she must be ill,” contributed Marilyn.
    “And you, Mari? What do you think?” Her father’s glance was unexpectedly gentle. “Do you suppose that, like you, she might think I—we—people didn’t care about what happened to her?”
    “I don’t know.” Marilyn stared with some attention into her coffee cup. “When people keep away from each other it’s easy to get wrong impressions, isn’t it?” He didn’t answer that, and after a while Clare said, as gently as she might have to one of her children, “Drink your coffee, Greg. We’ll start as soon as you’re ready.”
    “I’m ready now.” He got up quickly.
    “Mari, here’s my shopping list.” Her mother handed over a slip of paper and some notes. “I don’t know what time we’ll get back, so would you see after that for me, dear?”
    “Yes, of course.” With difficulty Marilyn concealed her own impatience to be off, for she could hardly wait to join Pat at her new address and warn her that the chase was much hotter than they had ever expected. That, indeed, it might be wiser for her to move yet again, so that she should be more than one jump ahead.
    Cleverly, she managed to delay her parents for a quarter of an hour longer, which made her fairly certain that Pat would have got well away before they could drive the miles to Westcliff. For her own plans, it was perhaps just as well to do the shopping first. This, she argued, would give her sister time to arrive at the new address, where they would immediately review their plans and make any necessary fresh decisions.
    On her own at last, she whisked round the flat, cleared up the breakfast things, and hurried off to do the shopping. Like most shopping, it took a good deal longer than she had expected. But she got everything, took it back to the flat, distributed it in the proper places, so that there should be no impression that she had done anything in a wild hurry, and then at last she was free.
    “Pat’s bound to be there by now,” she assured herself, as she took the Underground to Notting Hill Gate. “By the time I’ve walked to the hotel—”
    Like the shopping, the walk took longer than she had expected, and after a while the thought struck her that she was not really going in the right direction.
    “Idiot! Why didn’t I look up the exact address before I started?” she asked herself angrily. “If I come to a post office, I’ll have a glance at a directory.”
    But before she found a post office she suddenly saw the garage which she and Pat had both remembered. Even from a distance she