Missing Susan Read online

  “And one more-Maud Marsh.” He nodded toward the silver-haired lady from Berkeley. “That’s it, I think.”

  “Excuse me. You forgot me.”

  Rowan Rover looked up from his list. “Did I? I thought I had read out all the names. You are…”

  “Susan Cohen. From Minneapolis.”

  Rowan Rover’s smile faded as he stared at the belligerent-looking blonde. He made a show of consulting his list again. “Susan Cohen. It’s here, of course. It’s just that I thought I’d already said it. No, I wouldn’t forget you.”

  After a moment’s silence, during which the color grudgingly returned to Rowan Rover’s face, the members of the group picked up their belongings and surged at him with questions.

  He held up a hand to forestall the onslaught. “I am told that the tour coach will be waiting for us in the loading zone just outside. Our driver should be there now unless he has been delayed in the interminable traffic that one inevitably encounters on the motorway. I don’t know who thought up the road system out here, but he evidently came from a family not known for precognition, because he certainly didn’t foresee-”

  Alice MacKenzie interrupted his tirade. “Do you want us to go outside now?”

  “Yes,” said Rowan. “Let us be optimistic.”

  “And will there be a sign on the side of the bus that says MURDER TOUR?”

  Rowan Rover sighed. “No, madam. Definitely not. We don’t want to be mistaken for the IRA.” He ended further discussion by turning and marching for the glass doors of the exit, while the tour members scrambled behind him, balancing suitcases and handbags as they ran.

  Once assembled on the sidewalk outside, Rowan Rover turned and faced his charges. “Ladies,” he intoned, “and Charles.” He nodded toward the lone gentleman in the party. “If you will all stay here, I will attempt to locate the coach.”

  With a reassuring wave, Rowan Rover hurried away. Once out of sight of the party, he took out a cigarette and lit it with trembling hands. Susan Cohen. There she was: undeniably real and unavoidably doomed. He had three weeks in which to kill her. Somehow, despite the arrival of a fiscally sound ten-thousand-pound check, the murder scheme had never seemed more than an idle exercise in theory. Until now. Rowan Rover had spent the past few years making a living out of idle murder theories, and this one had seemed little different from the others. “Suppose Florence Maybrick knew that her husband was an arsenic eater,” he would say in one of his crime lectures. “It would be very easy then for her to purchase some arsenic, or even to steal some of his own private stock…” It was great fun to speculate. But he, Rowan Rover, had never had to buy any arsenic. Or to watch the death throes of the subsequent victim. Now, suddenly, he had to move from the theoretical to the practical-and to accomplish the task before ten potential witnesses, all of them avowed crime buffs. Was he mad?

  He looked up to find that a large tour coach had pulled up alongside him. “Mr. Rover?” the driver inquired in a working-class twang. “Mystery tour?”

  Rowan took a long drag on his cigarette. “Right,” he wheezed. “They’re just around the corner.”

  “Climb aboard, then, and we’ll go and get them.”

  Rowan Rover hesitated. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not me, mate. But if you’re ferrying about a load of American ladies, there’s sure to be objections. Regular health nuts, some of them.” He was young and blond and he looked as if he should be running across a rugby field rather than driving a bus. He smiled again as Rowan Rover mounted the steps to the coach. “My name’s Bernard,” he said. “I’m from Kensington.”

  “And you know where you’re going, I take it?”

  “Complete instructions,” said Bernard. “Not as if it ever changes, though. All the tourists want to go to the same dreary places.”

  Rowan Rover smirked. “I think this lot may surprise you.”

  “Alas, regardless of their doom,

  The little victims play!

  No sense have they of ills to come,

  Nor care beyond today.”

  – THOMAS GRAY

  CHAPTER 5

  WINCHESTER

  WHEN ALL THE luggage had been stowed into the undercarriage of the coach, and the travelers had boarded the bus two by two, like Noah’s passengers on an earlier tour, Rowan Rover turned to address the group. First he introduced Bernard, their friendly and experienced coach driver, who would be the final authority on where the bus could and could not go. “England is not all motorways yet,” he reminded them. “Medieval towns were not constructed to accommodate lorries. Some of the rural counties are quite unspoiled. When we get down into the West Country, you will see some narrow lanes that wouldn’t take horses two abreast, much less allow this tin beast an unscathed passage.”

  They looked up at Rowan with polite interest, possibly subdued by the fact that as far as their bodies were concerned it was ten A.M. after a grueling transatlantic all-nighter. Although the coach would have held three times their number comfortably, they still insisted upon sitting two by two, and they were all concentrated in the front six rows. He must, he realized, make a start at learning their names. His eyes strayed toward the right front seat, where a sleepy-looking Susan Cohen sat alone. He knew her name well enough; ten to go.

  The bus left the airport terminal, and for the first time the members of the tour got a glimpse of English scenery. It was not an auspicious beginning. Acres of scrub woodland and pasture stretched out on either side of the congested motorway, looking less than glamorous under a buttermilk sky that threatened rain at any moment.

  After a moment’s experimentation with the coach microphone, Rowan Rover resumed his briefing. “Our first destination is Winchester, appropriately enough. After all, Winchester was the first capital of England, both before and after the Norman Conquest. It was the capital of Saxon Wessex, and later William the Conqueror’s capital of Norman England. He built a palace there after the invasion.”

  “It’s a bakery now,” said Emma Smith.

  The guide stopped in mid-vowel. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The site of William the Conqueror’s palace is now occupied by a bakery. It’s beside the market cross. The bakery has a little sign in the window.”

  “Specializing in French rolls, no doubt,” said Rowan acidly. He consulted his lecture notes. “And many of the early kings are buried in Winchester Cathedral. We will be staying at the Wessex, a Trusthouse Forte Hotel right on the cathedral green.”

  “I don’t remember any hotel there,” muttered Emma Smith to her mother.

  Elizabeth, who was sitting in the seat in front of them, overheard this remark and turned around. “Have you been to Winchester before?”

  “Yes, when I was in college, I went on an archaeological dig to Winchester. We were digging for the old Saxon cathedral that had been destroyed by William the Conqueror in 1066. Its ruins are beneath the present churchyard. But there wasn’t a hotel next to the cathedral. I’m sure of it.”

  “You went on the dig when you were in college?” said Maud Marsh, momentarily distracted from the indifferent scenery of the motorway. “How did American students happen to be allowed on the dig?”

  “I think the British may have needed the money to do it in a hurry,” said Emma. “As I recall, a private company was planning to build something on land that had once been part of the cathedral holdings. When they started excavating, they found ruins, so they gave the archaeologists a certain amount of time to excavate the site before it was destroyed. Two American universities-Duke and North Carolina-put up the money in exchange for being allowed to send their own archaeology students over for field study. At least I think that’s how it went.”

  Miriam Angel laughed at the memory of her daughter’s adventure. “Emma wrote us twice a week, telling us about what they were finding and what work she had been assigned. Once, I remember we got a letter from her that said, ‘Dear Mom and Dad, This week we are finding mass graves in the old churchyard. We
have dug up lepers from the Crusades, and plague victims from the Black Death. How long do germs live?’ Her father wrote her back: ‘We don’t know, but we burned your letters.’ ”

  “One of our daughters wanted to major in archaeology,” said Nancy Warren, with a glance at her husband. “Did you become an archaeologist, Emma?”

  “No. That was the Sixties, when you did things that had no bearing on real life. I majored in math after that, and I taught for a while before I got married. This will be my first trip back to Winchester since the dig.”

  “I expect a lot has changed since you were there, Emma,” said her mother. “Twenty years.”

  Emma Smith frowned. “I hope it isn’t too commercialized,” she sighed.

  Across the aisle Frances Coles giggled. “If William the Conqueror is running a bakery, I’d expect the worst, if I were you.”

  By this time Rowan Rover had finished his introductory speech and the coach was pulling onto the motorway, heading south for Winchester. Rowan slid into the seat beside Elizabeth MacPherson and consulted his notes, with a view to scheduling a fatal accident.

  “Any murders in Winchester?” asked Elizabeth.

  With heroic effort Rowan Rover managed not to spring from his seat and run screaming down the aisle. Instead he reached for a cigarette and took particular care to note which end to light. Once it was lit, he exercised even greater care not to stick that end into his mouth. Drawing a few calming puffs of nicotine into his lungs, he turned to his companion and murmured, “I’m sorry. Didn’t catch that over the noise of the engine. What was it you were saying?”

  “I wondered if there were any famous murders associated with Winchester,” Elizabeth said. “The only one I can think of is Sweet Fanny Adams.”

  Rowan stifled a cough. “That was in Alton,” he wheezed. “Dreadful story. Dismembered girl in a meadow a hundred and twenty-odd years ago. Couldn’t be much to see there now.”

  “I expect not,” said Elizabeth wistfully. “I suppose they buried her?”

  “The British Navy has its doubts,” said Rowan. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m a forensic anthropologist. I was hoping to get a chance to use my training at least once on this tour.”

  Rowan Rover inhaled another column of smoke down the wrong passage. When his coughing fit subsided and he had waved away all inquiries about his health, he said, “I expect you will have a chance to do a bit of that at Madame Tussaud’s when the tour concludes in London. You know about the Chamber of Horrors, of course?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “And I’m looking forward to taking your Ripper tour as well. Incidentally, I’ve read your book, Death Takes a Holiday. What an array of crimes. Do you remember the Alexander Evans case?”

  “I believe so,” said Rowan Rover, trying to channel his thoughts back to murder in the abstract. “Glasgow, wasn’t it? Young boy who poisoned his family and was sent to Broadmoor?”

  “Right,” said Elizabeth. “I knew him.”

  “Did you really?” asked Rowan Rover happily. “This was after he got out, I take it? Oh! Were you on that dig in the Highlands with him where he started up again? Were you really?”

  For the next thirty miles they prattled on, dropping killers’ names left and right, while Alice MacKenzie dropped off to sleep and Susan Cohen, refreshened after her own nap, told Bernard the bus driver in agonizing detail all about beautiful downtown Minneapolis.

  Nearly two hours later the coach left the motorway and negotiated a series of increasingly smaller thoroughfares, until it finally pulled in to the city of Winchester. Emma Smith studied the narrow streets, flanked by rose brick buildings, sporting shop names and pub signs. “I don’t recognize any of this,” she said.

  “We may have come in the back way, so to speak,” said Frances Coles soothingly. “After all, the driver has to choose a route wide enough to accommodate the bus.”

  “Look, Emma!” said her mother, who was gazing out the window. “Isn’t that the market cross? I recognized it from one of the coasters you brought me.”

  Emma studied the street scene with a frown of recognition. “That was the high street,” she said. “But it isn’t a street anymore. Apparently, they have made it into a mall.” Her frown suggested that she disapproved of the giddy town planners who were mucking about with the design of an ancient city. She braced herself for a renovated cathedral with neon lights and a petting zoo.

  Fortunately, however, civic irresponsibility stopped short of architectural sacrilege. A moment later the bus rounded a corner. “Winchester Cathedral,” Bernard announced.

  “Right over there.” It was quite unchanged. The gray Gothic edifice with its spires and buttresses sat in the middle of a well-kept green, looking much as it had for centuries, unaltered since Cromwell’s men shot out the huge pictorial stained-glass window for cannon practice and the puzzle-inept churchmen had glued it back in as a mosaic. Twentieth-century visitors to the cathedral often praised its twelfth-century builders for their modern design instincts, when, in fact, the credit should have been given to the Roundhead Artillery.

  “And here’s your hotel,” said Bernard, stopping the coach in the driveway of a very modern brick and glass building a hundred yards from a wing of the cathedral.

  “I see,” said Emma Smith thoughtfully. “This is what they were planning to build back in the Sixties when they found the artifacts. This is where the cathedral outbuildings would have been.”

  Rowan Rover was on his feet with more immediate concerns. “Ladies and Charles,” he announced, “this is what the tour calls a free evening, which you are soon to learn means that it is not free in any monetary sense. On free evenings your meal is not paid for. You are welcome to find a reasonably priced pub or to dine here at the Wessex. We have nothing planned for you this evening except a glass of wine in the lounge at seven-optimistically referred to in the schedule as a sherry party. I hope at that time that we can talk a bit about what your interests are and perhaps get more acquainted. After that, you may have dinner on your own.”

  He braced himself for a storm of protest from budget-bound Americans, who were, he knew, already reeling from the unexpected rise of the pound, making their dollars worth half as much as last year. To his surprise, no one objected to an evening at leisure. “It’s only money,” said Susan Cohen with her grating laugh. “I wonder if Winchester has any pizza parlors.”

  When the coach door opened, Rowan stationed himself on the pavement in case anyone needed help getting out. They looked fit enough, but you could never be certain. “Bernard and the hotel porter will assist you with your cases. After that, we shan’t be seeing Bernard until tomorrow afternoon.”

  After he shepherded them into the Wessex and saw to it that everyone had a room, Rowan Rover ascended to his own assigned quarters on the third floor to spend the remainder of the afternoon plotting his murder. He discovered that either by chance or as an expression of divine sarcasm, his tiny bedroom was graced with an enormous picture window, affording him an inescapable view of Winchester Cathedral. It loomed reproachfully before him in the fading sunlight, as he sat down with his itinerary to schedule in an unfortunate accident.

  His most optimistic maiden aunt wouldn’t have called Rowan Rover a religious person, but years of public school chapel-going had left a lingering impression upon his soul that was more superstition than piety; besides, his keenly developed sense of irony could not fail to miss the omen of the cathedral view overlooking his plottings of murder.

  “Well, look here,” he said to the ceiling, and to anything that might or might not lie infinitely above it, “I’ve already spent the money, all right? It’s for a good cause. Surely you don’t disapprove of a public school education? I could donate a bit to the Church, if you like.”

  He glanced out at the church, a squat gray pile of granite that seemed crouched like a hound of hell, ready to leap at his window. He tried to bolster his resolve by picturing the Deity as an ethereal version of Alec Guinness, n
odding understandingly at his plight as one gentleman to another, but instead he kept seeing his first wife, with that do-come-off-it, Rowan expression that seemed permanently ingrained into her features.

  “Look, it’s just this one murder,” said Rowan reasonably. “And then I shan’t break that particular commandment ever again. I could do something commendable to atone for it. Give up smoking-no, perhaps not that. It isn’t a commandment anyhow.” He wandered over to the bureau and began idly stuffing the complimentary chocolate packets and tea bags into his suitcase, next to the extra bars of soap and vials of shampoo already liberated from the bathroom. “Well, I’ll think of something.”

  Alice MacKenzie and Frances Coles, who had paid tour fees based on a double occupancy rate, decided to be roommates. They had followed the porter upstairs to a spacious third-floor room overlooking the car park. Once they settled in, they boiled water for tea in the electric kettle provided in each room by the management.

  Frances’ eyes shone with excitement as she savored her first trip to England. She was a primary school teacher, with that delightful quality of unjaded enthusiasm that one sometimes finds in people who enjoy small children and spend considerable time among them. With her winsome smile and jogger’s figure, she made an appealing contrast to Alice’s bluff heartiness.

  “What do you think so far?” asked Frances.

  Alice was reading the little packets in the china bowl beside the teapot. “Too early to tell,” she said, selecting two tea bags and placing them in the pot, which she filled to the brim with the boiling water. “I thought our guide was a little strange at first, but he seems very knowledgeable.”

  “I want to buy his book,” said Frances. “If we see any bookshops, I’ll go in and look for it. I also collect cat figurines.” She fingered the emerald-eyed cat pinned to the shawl collar of her black sweater.

  “We have time for a walk before dinner,” said Alice cheerily. With a fresh application of aloe cream, her finger had ceased to trouble her, and she felt refreshed after her nap in the coach.