Whispers of a Lesser God Page 6

  He quickly composed himself and entered his Duncan Goodwin Mr Charming mode. “Good afternoon, madam – Mrs Pauline Flanders, I presume. Here’s my business card. Hope it’s not inconvenient for me to turn up like this. To be completely honest with you, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet and now that bee is buzzing around inside my head even more.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr Goodwin. Please don’t think that you’re inconveniencing us. Yes, I’m Pauline Flanders, but please call me Pauline. On the contrary, Mum and my daughter Stephanie are very excited that they are going to meet the manager of Daphne Devine and the Ghost Towns.”

  Just then a girl of maybe nineteen appeared at Pauline’s shoulder, and Duncan had to check himself and hold back from saying anything which would sound outlandish. He suddenly knew that he was on to something. Stephanie Flanders could easily have passed as an identical twin to Caroline Moran Flanders, apart from the fact that she had blonde hair and clear blue eyes.

  “This is my daughter, Steph. She’s a bit shy, but she has a vinyl copy of Last Train from Ghost Town that she would like you to sign. She’s been like a cat on hot bricks all day, ha ha ha!”

  This was a good indicator that Duncan was going to get a good reception from the Flanders family. But he still knew that he had to tread very carefully with every single word that he said. Suddenly he was very aware of the photographs in his jacket pocket, but again he had to check himself to avoid going too far, too fast. Instead he kept on track, still in his Mr Charming mode.

  “Well, Stephanie, I’ll be delighted to sign your copy. And I know if Daphne was here she would be thoroughly delighted to sign it too. She simply adores her fans, young and old alike.”

  Duncan was still running on instinct and flying blind. But that instinct seemed to be guiding him. As the girl ran upstairs to collect her album, Duncan thought that it was time to make his next move. This could really draw them in and clutch their interest into the reason, or excuse that he had travelled all the way from London to visit them. He put his hand inside his jacket pocket.

  “Oh, by the way, I brought you some signed photos of Daphne with her Ghost Towns. My word, Stephanie certainly bears a striking resemblance to Caroline, apart from hair and eye colours. She was always a little reluctant to be photographed, but what do you think?”

  This was a shrewd move on his part: asking Pauline, without pressing her. She looked thoroughly delighted, took the photos and slowly thumbed through them. Duncan studied the look on her face carefully, trying to gauge what she was thinking. Apart from a small frown, a slight smile and fluttering eyelashes, she wasn’t giving much away facially.

  Suddenly she thumbed back through the photos and picked out two. She then looked him straight in the eyes with a piercing and brazen look and said, “My word, you’re right. It never occurred to me before, because the girl is not as prominent as the others. Apart from the hair and eye colours, yes, the likeness is incredible. Well, I’ll be…”

  Once again, Duncan had taken a step in the right direction. He had opened a door, or rather, as he now seriously believed, he was being guided to open certain doors at certain times in sequence. Pauline Flanders was now doing some wondering and thinking of her own accord.

  “I must show Mum these. She’s in the back room and she asked me to bring you through to meet her, as long as I thought you were legit, of course. Can’t be too careful these days, you know.”

  Just then Stephanie came bounding down the stairs, clutching her album. She handed it to Duncan and he drew a pen from his pocket and signed it. Then they all trooped down the hall, with Pauline leading them, to meet Beryl Moran Flanders. As they entered the room Duncan felt what he could only describe as a warm glow deep within his solar plexus. Yes indeed, he could feel a presence. He then noticed an elderly lady sitting in a rocking chair, with a half-knitted, multicoloured jumper in her lap. On seeing them enter she put the jumper on a side table and placed two long knitting needles on top of it. She stood up quite sharply and walked forward quickly.

  Duncan took stock of her countenance. Although ageing and bird-like, Beryl appeared to be remarkably agile and sprightly for an old woman. And, as he was about to find out, very sharp and alert, with no indication whatsoever of an ageing mind. Pauline had already moved forwards to introduce them to each other. Duncan smiled at her and put his hand out.

  “Good afternoon, madam. I know Pauline has told you all about me and I sincerely hope I’m not disturbing you. I’m really just another Daphne Devine fan; I just happen to be fortunate enough to be her manager as well. And I’m glad to be among other fans. That’s how lucky I am.”

  He hoped that his self-abasing repertoire was working, without coming across as nauseating. Stephanie moved to the other side of him and he felt as though he was being flanked by two, who had already won over. Now it was crucial to impress the most important and fundamental player in this very wobbly game he was playing. But the game appeared to be playing out by itself. He was only moving along as each obstacle appeared in front of him.

  “Hello, Mr Goodwin. Pauline has told me all about you. I can’t believe you wanted to meet us. She told me that the gal who plays the piano for Daphne Devine has the same name as my daughter, Caroline. Caroline Moran Flanders can’t be a common name, but she can’t be the same gal, because my Caroline disappeared about forty years ago. But I can tell you that she was mad about Daphne Devine. She used to imitate her all the time. I can still remember her singing and dancing in front of our old black-and-white TV, using a hairbrush as a microphone. I’ve still got the photos of her from back then. I think she really could’ve become a singer, the way she was.”

  Yet again Duncan felt that he was on to something, and he could barely hide his enthusiasm as he said, “That’s great. I’ve just given Pauline some signed photos of Daphne Devine and the band, and Caroline is in all of them. I think she would like you to see them.”

  Pauline handed her mother the photos, with the three she had picked out at the top of the pile. Immediately Beryl’s eyebrows shot up and her jaw fell open as she thumbed through them. Finally, after several minutes of studying them, she looked up at Duncan and said, “Well, I’ll be. Well, I’ll be. I don’t know what to say. I think Caroline would probably have looked like this if she had reached her teens. I mean, the shape of her face, the smile, the big oval eyes… I can’t believe it. I’ll just get my photo album and see what you think, Mr Goodwin. The likeness is uncanny – she looks more like Caroline than Stephanie does…”

  Duncan inwardly breathed a sigh of relief; his gamble had paid off. He sensed that he had won all three of these women over, within the parameters of what was becoming more and more bizarre and mysterious. But he knew that he still must proceed with extreme caution, while maintaining his Mr Charming mode. He was now convinced that he had been guided here for a reason.

  “Please call me Duncan, madam. I know that this may sound rather absurd, but for me it is so important that I find this girl that I’m prepared to follow any slight lead. From the moment she walked into my agency fifteen months ago, she changed my life completely. It was not just the brilliance of the songs that she offered me. It was as if she had been brought to me for a reason. I’m not only indebted to her; she instigated a chain reaction that took on a life of its own. From the moment I looked at the songs, I knew exactly who they were for and what I had to do with them. Project Daphne Devine never died, it had only gone away for a while and was waiting to return in all of its former glory. But it needed to be planned like a military operation, and I had the honour of planning that operation. And I sensed that it was imperative that I picked up the baton and ran with it, because I would never get a second chance. When we were young Daphne and I parted on rather bad terms; partly my fault and partly hers. But I’ve always known that we left a whole world of unfinished business, and that unfinished business was planted right under my nose. Ladies, I am desperate…”

/>   As soon as he had finished, Duncan realised that he had let a deep, pent-up emotion slip into his speech. But he had been completely honest and open with his thoughts. The question now was how these three women, who had never met him before, would react to his confession. They all looked at him with deep sympathy; three generations of a family. Pauline was the first to speak.

  “Steph, get the photo albums from the cupboard. I’m sure Mr Goodwin will be surprised by some of them. They’re on the top shelf of the big cupboard in the front room. Well, you’ve surprised us, Mr Goodwin, and now it’s our turn to surprise you. But I’ve got a lot of explaining to do first.”

  Stephanie scurried away and soon brought back two big photo albums, bursting with photos. Pauline took them and planted them on a coffee table. She then motioned for Duncan and her mother to sit down beside each other on the sofa. She looked Duncan in the face and said, “Okay, Mr Goodwin. I’ll let Mum run through her favourite ones and you can tell me what you think.”

  Duncan sat down next to Beryl and sank so far down into the old, ragged sofa that his head was nearly level with the old woman’s. Both Pauline and Stephanie found this amusing for some reason. Pauline then carefully placed the first album in her mother’s lap and opened it. Beryl’s face instantly lit up as she looked at the old but well-kept photographs. She went off into a world of her own, casually explaining to Duncan the history of each photo. Even on seeing the first three he knew who he was looking at, as a very young girl. Caroline had led him here. The eyes, the face, the smile, the slightly puzzled look. Yes, it was her and she had brought him here to meet her family and let him know who she really was. Lovingly, Beryl took each photo in her gnarled old hands and showed them to Duncan, while thoughtfully giving him a compact history of each one.

  “Ha ha ha! This one is of Caroline sitting in the rhubarb patch. She was fascinated by the way the rhubarb would make a creaking noise as it was growing. She thought that it was talking to her – ha ha ha! She would say, ‘That one creaks, that one groans, and I think that one’s little liar, because he makes different noises.’ Aha! Here she is singing into a hairbrush. And this one, she’s singing and dancing in front of the TV. That was her party piece!”

  Suddenly Duncan felt a rush of adrenaline rocket up from his solar plexus to his head. He looked closely at the photo again and no, his eyes were not deceiving him. Caroline was looking up into the camera, and just in the background was the unmistakable figure of a very young Daphne Devine on the TV screen. There were three different photos of the same scene; Caroline in a different pose, holding the hairbrush, and a teenage Daphne Devine in a different pose on the old black-and-white TV. He was overwhelmed with emotion. Caroline was actually communicating with him. It was if she felt that she owed him an explanation and was giving him that explanation in the most peculiar way. Finally he had seen all of the photos and Pauline took the albums and put them on the table.

  “Well, Mr Goodwin. What do you think? I think we’re all thinking the same thing. If I thought that you were an imposter or a raving lunatic you would never have got past the front door. Now it’s my turn to explain why I was so eager to meet you. Can I talk to you in private? I think there’s things it’s only fair that you should know. Please follow me.”

  She led him through the hallway into the kitchen that overlooked the backyard. Stephanie did not follow, because she knew what her mother intended to do, and Beryl went back to her knitting.

  “Me and Steph have only been living here for about a year. To cut a long story short, my husband left me for his secretary. Or rather, yet another self-propelled big boobs with no brains or sense.”

  Duncan had to suppress a laugh. He was beginning to like Pauline Moran Flanders.

  “Well before we moved in, Mum kept saying that strange things had started happening around the house. Plants not being where she left them. Bedding being thrown open, when she had made the bed a few hours before. And at night, bumping and knocking sounds waking her up.

  “At first we thought she might be going a bit batty. But when we moved in, that all changed. Not only bumping and knocking noises in the night, but books being moved, magazines being opened, with pages pulled out, but the real kicker was this.”

  She walked over to a kitchen cabinet, opened the top cupboard and pulled out an old hairbrush. She handed it to Duncan and he immediately saw that it was full of hair. Caroline’s hair. Pauline was watching his face, trying to gauge what he was thinking. But she already knew.

  “That is the brush she used to sing into. No mystery there. But it had never been found, from the day that she disappeared. Then about fourteen months ago, it just appeared on Mum’s bedside table. As you can see, that’s Caroline’s hair. But there is more, and now you’re gonna be as confused as I am. Because what I’m about to show you defies everything that I’ve ever known as real.”

  She then led him over to the kitchen window and asked him to look out into the garden.

  “Well, what do you see?”

  “Just a garden with some evergreen bushes, holly and… and a patch of very large rhubarb plants.”

  “Rhubarb! In full bloom, in the middle of bloody December. What is that?”

  Duncan now realised with great clarity why Pauline had been anxious to meet him. She hoped that he might be able to join the dots somewhere. Just like he had hoped that she might offer some hope, some theory, some answer to a mystery that had been haunting him. Instead they were both left looking at each other, knowing full well that they had been drawn together for a reason. Stephanie had been listening at the door and was watching them with guarded interest.

  When Duncan caught the train back to London he felt sad; sad and confused. But the one reassuring thing which he had come away with was that he was not alone. He had come hoping to find answers. Instead he had found three true friends that he did not expect to find. Would he tell Daphne? No, she had suffered enough. He would have to keep this private. Some things are better left alone when they can cause pain to another person, and he did not want to cause Daphne any more pain.

  Pauline had told him before he left that the only suspect in Caroline’s disappearance was a lorry driver from Watford. But none of the puzzle pieces fitted. Although he was delivering around the area at the time of her disappearance, he had not been seen anywhere in the area. He had not even stayed in a bed and breakfast down near the fishing port, and there were no B&Bs anywhere on the estate. However, the police inspector in charge of the investigation had a strong suspicion that it could have been him. Although the man was a known paedophile, his only convictions were for assaults against boys. The justice system, in all of their wisdom and tick-box bureaucrat logic, decided that because he had a ‘proclivity’ for young boys, as they put it, he would not be interested in girls. But Chief Inspector Charlie Bewes would not let the matter rest and ended up being removed from the case, much to his consternation. And three years later, the same lorry driver had been arrested, convicted and sentenced for the brutal murder of a young girl of seven. She had not been sexually assaulted, but while this brute may have had a proclivity for young boys, he could have harboured a terrible hatred for young girls. They tried to keep this from Charlie Bewes, who had an intense dislike for tick-box bureaucrats anyway. And when he found out through the grapevine, even though he had retired, he hit the roof. The only consolation he had was that the perpetrator was stabbed to death when a prison guard accidentally – nudge, nudge, nod’s as good as a wink – let him out into the recreation yard where a well-known paedophile hater just happened to be waiting for him with a butcher knife that he had mysteriously acquired from the kitchen.

  The whole story was a tragedy that had a terrible knock-on effect that could never be forgotten. Caroline’s father died suddenly six years later of a massive heart attack. Beryl believed that he really died of a broken heart. And Pauline’s father had left Beryl for a much younger woman.
br />   Dorothy sat on her sofa watching Coronation Street; it was barely recognisable as the Coronation Street that she loved in the ’60s. But then again, she reflected, My, how things have changed; how society has changed. All of the soap operas were only reflecting this in their complicated and carefully crafted scripts. Life had indeed become complicated, lonely, difficult and hideously expensive. If an individual was not hard-boiled, selfish and prepared to ride roughshod over others, then that individual would be boxing from the back foot for their entire lives. Her cats were watching her curiously, perched on each arm of the sofa. At least Clemmie and Booby did not have to contemplate such nonsense. The wind had begun to rise, rolling in from the North Sea, and yes, as the forecast had predicted, the first showers of light rain had begun to trickle down the windowpanes.

  As the rain steadily increased and became progressively harder, she had to turn the volume up on the TV, even though on the screen a couple were having a loud, blazing row. “The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow,” Dorothy said to herself. But it was not snow that began to land on the windowpanes. It was a sharp smattering of hailstones that were hitting the windows and ricocheting off the windowsill. She turned up the volume again, but thankfully the blazing row on screen had petered out and now a very fat man was leaning against a bar, supping beer from a pint mug. She turned the volume down again, because the fat man was having a quiet conversation with a thin man wearing a cloth cap, who was guzzling beer as if he was trying to quench a stupendous thirst.